
oassJS &q-a a 

Copyright N° 

CORfRIGHT DEPOSfE 



OTHER BOOKS BY DR. FLEWELLING 



CHRIST AND THE DRAMAS OF DOUBT 

PERSONALISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
PHILOSOPHY 

PHILOSOPHY AND THE WAR 



Bergson and 
Personal Realism 



BY 

RALPH TYLER FLEWELLING 

Professor of Philosophy in the 
University of Southern California 



ft ~M 



THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1920, by 
RALPH TYLER FLEWELLING 



©CI.A604296 



NOV 20 i320 



n*% | 



To 
MY FATHER AND MOTHER 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction 21 

SECTION I 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE 

CHAPTER I 

BERGSON'S DEFINITION OF BEING 

Uncertainty in the Definition of Matter 32 

This uncertainty arises from the use of words with 
double meaning, from imperfect physical analogies, 
and from the mystery of life. The confusion arising 
from the attempt to describe both matter and spirit 
by the abstract term "perception." The difficulty 
attending a description of matter as the inverse of 
movement. 

Failure to Note a Real Distinction between 

Matter and Spirit 36 

Again matter and spirit cannot be safely identified 
under the term "image." If matter is an aggregate 
of images, and perception is the reference to another 
"image" which is myself, we remain either in a world 
which is wholly phenomenal, or we do not reach a 
realm of thought at all. This fate follows his defi- 
nition of personality as clearly as it does his definition 
of body. 

From this Definition of Matter Arises Confu- 
sion in the Meaning of Self 40 

The personal factor cannot be ruled out of per- 
ception. Perception cannot be fundamental reality. 

7 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

The Idea of "Duration" Alone is Insufficient 
to Solve the Conflict between Mind and 

Matter 43 

"Duration" in so far as it is a solution is endowed 

with the unique powers of personality. 

The Resort to a Theory of Vibration as the 

Basis of Explanation 45 

Metaphysical conclusions drawn from the intro- 
duction of the vibratory theory are purely materialistic 
and leave the problem still unsolved. The persistent 
ghost of exorcised intellectualization. 

CHAPTER H 
THE DEFINITION OF MEMORY AND LIFE 

The Meaning of "Pure" Memory 55 

Memory is the intersection of mind and matter; 
"pure" memory is experience after the event. The 
failure to complete the connection between matter 
and spirit. 

Of the Relation between Perception and 

Memory 58 

We are met by the fact that neither perception nor 
memory is anything apart from persons in a personal 
world. Memory must be of concrete experiences by 
concrete persons. Bergson's "pure" memory must be 
held practically synonymous with the more common 
term "personality" if it is to be retained. 

The Assumed Independence of Memory and 
Matter is Not Tenable on these Terms. . 64 
Independence between thought and thing can be 
attained only by the assumption of a higher unity. 



CONTENTS 

The Metaphysical Bearing of the Things 

which Escape Our Explanation 66 

Dualism that exists by express consent of creative 
intelligence. 

The Definition of Life 69 

(a) Life as the Intersection of Streams of Reality 
and as Initial Impulsion. 

We must, then, explain the creation of these inde- 
pendent streams, and find that we have but committed 
ourselves to the infinite regress. If life is to be funda- 
mental, it must also be self-creative. 

(b) Life as Duration. 

Bergson here comes to the heart of the problem, 
but needs to recognize the personal implications of 
the idea. 

(c) Life as Vital Impulse. 

The unforeseen requirements of a vital impulse ade- 
quate for homogeneity. It must in a real sense be 
deterministic or it cannot explain the world. 

(d) Life as the Point of Minimum Cognition. 
Here the thing to be remembered is that intuition 

can never in actual perception be entirely clear of intel- 
lectualization. 

CHAPTER m 
INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

It is Necessary to Attain Accuracy in the Use 

of the Term "Intuition" 86 

Differences of nature must not be concealed by the 
use of a general term. Used indiscriminately as a 
name for the mental process in man, instinct in ani- 
mals, and cellular attraction in plants. Any real 
choice is attended by possession of personality. 

9 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

The Intellectual Element in All Human In- 
tuition 90 

Human intuition is inseparable from intelligence. 
Unintelligible intuition would be meaningless on the 
human plane. 

Intuition as a Practical Guide in Life 93 

We may be able to pronounce it valuable, but 
hardly superior, and not infallible. It is an inferior 
guide under new or unusual conditions. 

Implications of Such a Doctrine as to the Nature 

of Truth 96 

General truths are an expression of the nature of 
life, and as such are a part of reality. 

The Theory of Intuition as an Aid to Religious 

Ideas 99 

It does not provide a solution of the problem of 
revelation, of miracle, nor of spirituality. 

In What Sense Can Intuition be Said to Bring 

Us Nearer Reality? 104 

Intuition as acting personality in distinction from 
reflecting personality. Conscious choice becomes 
unconscious habit, and, therefore, life itself. 

CHAPTER IV 
THE THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

Space as a Qualityless, Homogeneous Medium. . 110 

Space gains a universal validity not from its inde- 
pendent, objective character but because it has 
meaning for a Supreme Creative Intelligence which 
wills a world of spatial relations. 
10 



CONTENTS 

The Idea of Time as a Form of Space 112 

This idea arises from the distinction necessary 
between time as given by reflection, and the time of 
successive experiences which is really duration. But 
I do not relate things and events to myself after the 
same order. There is a difference between enume- 
ration of objects and succession of events. 

Time as Contracted Experience 117 

The difference between time and consciousness of 
time flown. The individual must in the end pay 
homage to the clock. 

Time as Duration 120 

The conflict between the idea of duration as expe- 
rience and as applying to matter. Time, materially 
speaking, derives its meaning from the unfinished 
character of the world. 

CHAPTER V 
FREEDOM AND CAUSATION 

The Conception of Freedom in the Philosophy 

of Change 133 

Bergson aims to escape both mechanism and deter- 
minism by the doctrine of duration, but his unclearness 
on duration as applied to matter vitiates the result 
because choice, which is the mark of freedom, is 
dependent upon personal duration. 

The Value and Possibility of a Purposeless 

Freedom 137 

A freedom of accident cannot account for a rational 
world. Such a freedom is valueless for religion. 
Freedom is inseparable from personality. The 
highest freedom is consonant with highest intelligence 
and moral character. Apart from this, skepticism. 
11 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Of Causation as Freed from Determinism 142 

(a) Duration in Things as Different from Duration 
in Self. 

Whatever the "elan" may be, it must act subject 
to the time order — that is, successively — and with pre- 
vision for the future if there is to be an evolutionary 
progress. If this progress is real, duration in things 
does not differ from duration in us, and the "elan" is 
purposive. 

(b) The Only Free Causation is Personal. 

This is the only ground on which we can maintain 
the reality of evolution. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING IN 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE 

The Implications of Impersonalism as to 

Ground of Being 152 

Bergson posits a God subject to matter, and so 
creatively inadequate. This God is lacking also in 
moral qualities and hence is inadequate to create a 
world with moral values. 

The Meaning of Duration and Change in the 

Creative Being 156 

Duration in the World Ground implies abiding self- 
consciousness in order to remain creatively active. 
Such a World Ground must retain unchanging moral 
and spiritual purpose. It must be not morally subject 
to the world. It must relate itself to but transcend 
the temporal order. 

12 



CONTENTS 

A True World-Ground Must be Self-Creative. 169 

An example of self -creative activity to be found in 
finite personality. A creative being might through the 
evolution of the world be realizing himself, which 
might be the essential definition of a living God. 

CHAPTER Vn 

THE FRAGILE FLOWER OF HUMAN 

PERSONALITY 

The Impossibility of an Impersonal Freedom. . 174 

Personality the needed element in a philosophy of 
change. 

Bergson's Definition of Personality 176 

Distinguished by its indefiniteness, in shifting from 
"body" to "image" to "I." Its unity is phenomenal, 
a matter of mental concentration. Personality be- 
comes a thing of degree. Haunted by an insurmount- 
able dualism. As an impediment to the "elan," per- 
sonality is reduced to the rank of inert matter. 

Disappearance of the Ground of Personal Im- 
mortality 188 

While philosophy may not be charged to prove 
immortality, there is reason to doubt the validity of 
any system which leaves no room for an instinct so 
universal and necessary. Thus alone can the creative 
continuity of the "elan vitale" be maintained. 

A Doctrine of Personality is Fundamental to 

Metaphysical Understanding 193 

No abiding philosophy can omit the ultimate ex- 
planation. 

13 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

SECTION II 
PERSONAL REALISM 

CHAPTER VIII 
THE AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

Realism in General 197 

At its best, realism strives to maintain the obvious, 
and to stop the analyzing away of the true nature of 
being. 

Neo-Realism 198 

Neo-realism seeks to escape the unrealities of dia- 
lectic by affirming independence of the objects of 
consciousness and the identity of object and percept. 
In the case of one school this leads to the position that 
reality is the relation of subject and object in percep- 
tion, but ignores the self-identifying nature of the sub- 
ject which makes perception possible. 

Personal Realism 200 

(a) Personal Realism Affirms Indivisibility of Per- 
sonality. 

It holds that reality is a connection and a relation 
indivisible except in abstract analysis. Pluralism is a 
fact only to the rationalizing nature of man. The 
only unity is a personal one. There is, strictly speak- 
ing, no dissociation of personality, but what is so 
termed is a dissociation of conscious states. 

(6) Personal Realism Aims an Advance over Ordi- 
nary forms of Personal Idealism. 

Personal idealism posits self-consciousness as 
fundamental to thought; personal realism affirms per- 

14 



CONTENTS 

sonality as the Ground of being and the indivisible 
real. Personality in the World Ground is limiting 
only because of uncertain notions of space and time. 
"Things as they are" must include personality, and 
because personality includes change and freedom we 
avoid a static world. 

(c) Personal Realism Aims through a Doctrine of 
Personality to Unite the Oppositions 

Personality presents the common ground of recon- 
ciliation demanded by modern thought. It presents 
an unmistakable example of self-causation, and of 
identity in change. In a world of mystery we must 
choose the mystery least incompatible with the whole 
of life. Is it better to be thrust back upon a lawless 
unintelligible ground of being, or shall we recognize its 
identity with the supreme mystery of all life, the 
mystery of personality? This standpoint gives 
distinct relief in the solution of the deepest problems, 
which are ultimately those that gather about the 
meaning of personality. 

CHAPTER IX 
THE DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY 

The Meaning of Personality in a System of Per- 
sonal Realism 223 

Personality as the indivisible unit of reality. It 
is not a combination of states of consciousness, nor do 
we consider the brain as the seat of the independent, 
self-existing soul. It is the essentially real. 

Some Essential Features of Personality 225 

(a) Self-Definition and Recognition of Other Person- 
alities. 

15 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Personal identity differs from numerical identity 
by relation to the temporal order. The personality 
realizes itself through personal relations. 

(b) Duration. 

(c) Freedom. 

To deny freedom would be to deny moral account- 
ability. 

(d) Causality. 

Causality is the unique possession of personality. 

The Self-Conscious and Self-Creative Elements 

in Personality 236 

By self-consciousness in man we mean the unique 
power of conscious self -consciousness through which he 
judges the motives of his action, and so becomes moral. 
The self-creative element, a first cause, the operation 
of which we each experience. Finite causation 
is limited by the world of relations; infinite cause is 
limited only by moral nature and purpose. 

Personality the Fundamental Reality 238 

In ultimate analysis, the personality is the one sur- 
vivor of time and change. 

CHAPTER X 

PERSONAL REALISM 

AND THE TROUBLESOME PROBLEMS OF 

PHILOSOPHY 

The Question of Causal Explanation 240 

Any mechanical or impersonal explanation is 
inconsistent with the maintenance of evolutionary 
progress. No explanation is to be had apart from 
purpose. The only self -creativity we know is personal. 

16 



CONTENTS 

Vibratory theories only delay the real problem which 
immediately arises of how differing speeds of vibration 
are interpreted not as vibrations but as qualities. 
The hypothetical nature of such theories. 

Space and Time 247 

Emphasis must be put upon the space and time 
transcending nature of personality. 

The Dualism of Thought and Thing 250 

This dualism is not to be overcome by ignoring 
either element. The relation of the two orders re- 
mains the question of philosophy. In making "rela- 
tion" the real, neo-realism drops into an abstraction 
akin to that of idealism. The prime reality is not the 
relation but the relator. The reality is persons in a 
personal world. The unity of personality is ultimate 
and less mysterious than philosophical abstraction. 

Error and Evil 254 

Error is not accounted for in the commonly 
accepted realism of perception. To avoid the issue is 
to raise too many problems. The idealistic solution 
of the problem of evil must submit to the test of the 
concrete instance. The only possible justification of 
the existence of error and evil is personal. 

CHAPTER XI 
PERSONALISM AND THE GROUND OF BEING 

Personality Assumed or Implied is the Basis of 

Explanation in Current Theories 261 

This is because the law of the sufficient reason 
demands an intelligent source for an intelligible 
world. "Unknowables," "monads," "atoms," "vor- 

17 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

tices," "electrons," or "elans," in so far as they explain 
are endowed with causality, freedom, duration, and 
even self-identity, which are the elements that make 
up personality. 

Affirming Personality in the World-Ground is 
not to Confuse God with His World. . . . 263 
God is immanent in his world, as is the artist in his 
picture. It is the expression of himself, but it is not 
himself. The demand that matter shall serve as a 
sort of body for the Deity is due to faulty thinking. 

A Changing World Implies not a Changing 

but a Living God %65 

To live implies an enriching content of experience 
rather than a changing moral purpose. 

Personal Realism Provides a Philosophical Basis 
for a Doctrine of Incarnation 270 

(a) Impossible, holding a view of God as Static, to 
show how he could be in Christ. 

Questions of human limitations, foreknowledge, 
omnipotence, etc., no longer haunt us if the chief 
attributes of God relate to character. They become 
merely academic questions. 

(6) Does away with the Question of how God could 
manifest himself in historic time. 

Time and space are to him both transcended and 
real. 

A Personal World-Ground Provides for "God, 

Freedom, and Immortality." 274 

An impersonal God or World-Ground is lacking in 
all qualities which give the idea practical value to man, 
reerects the system of necessity, and closes the door in 

18 



CONTENTS 

the face of humanity's one undying instinct, the hope 
of personal survival. 

CHAPTER XH 
INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM 

The revival of learning, break-up of feudalism, 
growth of democracy, new emphasis on science and 
the liberation of philosophy, all facilitated the growth 
of individualism. 

Politically, set forth in the work of Rousseau and 
Marx; in literature, Goethe, romanticism, realism, 
Nietzsche; educationally in Rousseau's theory of 
education; ethically represented in Spinoza; reli- 
giously, in the Methodist and kindred movements; 
scientifically, the dominance of the empirical method, 
Haeckel and modern science; philosophically, in 
modern realism, relativism, empiricism, and skepti- 
cism 

The Cultural Ideals of Individualism 282 

The perverted and irresponsible view of individual 
culture which neglects the moral attainments. 

The Contrasting Ideals of Personalism 284 

Its essential principle the necessity of moral and 
spiritual values in all true culture of personality. 

The Present Conflict between Individualism 

and Personalism 286 

Individualism with its doctrine of Superman devel- 
oped at the expense of the many and without moral 
regard is opposing a personalism which contends for 
the inalienable cultural rights of all men. 

19 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

The Cross as the Solution of the Deeper Prob- 
lems of Life 287 

As the individual reaches his highest personal 
attainment through suffering for righteousness, so 
the cross becomes the symbol of an uncompleted 
world in process of perfection. 

Index 291 



20 



INTRODUCTION 



INTRODUCTION 

The philosophy of change is as old as Hera- 
clitus, yet it has appeared again and again in the 
field of the history of philosophy, whenever 
other systems that have long contested the 
field have shown signs of weakness, decay, or 
deadlock. It is a natural compromise between 
the systems of sheer materialism and sheer 
idealism. It offers as reality something more 
tangible than abstract idea, namely, a law of 
change, and something less objective than the 
theories of materialism. 

It provides a movement under which the self- 
creative soul may express itself, and cross the 
line from subject to object, while it denudes 
materialism of its static inertia and helplessness, 
and gives to nature and life a unity. 

One cannot read the pages of the latest 
philosopher of change, Mr. Bergson, without 
being reminded of many names in the history 
of philosophy which his doctrines suggest. 

One recalls the impetus which another French 

philosopher, Descartes, gave to mechano-mate- 

rialistic speculation, which had its effect in 

running out to its limit the materialistic hypoth- 

23 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

esis, and making clear the demand for something 
better. One remembers the relation, or at 
least the concomitance, of this movement with 
the movement of realism in letters and in art. 
And though the term is used in a different way 
when speaking of realism in philosophy it is 
not to be forgotten that there is more than a 
casual connection between them. 

When one reads the doctrine of intuition, 
as against intellectualization, one cannot over- 
look the results of French romanticism with its 
great emphasis on the value of the psychological 
reaction of the individual, disclosed in the 
intuitionalism of Pascal and the surviving 
individualism in modern life which is known 
as a doctrine of the superman, which is the 
haunting spirit of modern literary realism. 

With the conscious barrenness of idealistic 
dialectic on the one hand and a sense in many 
quarters of the breakdown of materialistic 
explanation on the other, it is the most natural 
thing in the world that philosophy of the present 
hour should witness a new appeal to the things 
which sense does not reach and which intellect- 
ualization seems only to obscure. 

Essentially the Bergsonian system seems to 

us an attempt to give philosophical expression 

to a demand of the times; to offset the exclusive 

claims of materialism for reality; to refute the 

24 



INTRODUCTION 

idealistic trust in pure dialectic; to provide a 
definition of life which shall transcend those 
of science and yet leave room for spontaneity, 
contingency, and life; and, not least of all, to 
restore philosophy to the popular interest and 
to the uncritical by simplification. 

There is no doubt that Bergson has accom- 
plished many of the items of such a program, 
whether or not he ever had such a course in 
mind. He has done work which we believe is 
of great significance in the clearing of philo- 
sophical ideals. If at times we seem hyper- 
critical in our discussion of his teachings, it is 
that by rather extreme measures we may 
attract attention to elements of danger which 
are easily overlooked by reason of the winning 
charm and contagious enthusiasm of the philos- 
opher. 

It seems good to have a really great philoso- 
pher with so popular an appeal, and no doubt 
many of the points here complained of will 
be cleared up by Mr. Bergson himself in subse- 
quent works. The purpose of this volume is 
to show that the philosophy of change is not 
complete so long as it remains upon the abstract 
and impersonal basis. The difficulty with 
Bergson's realism, as well as with that of the 
neo-realists with whom he is often classed, is 
that in this abstract element they are nearer 
25 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

idealism than they dream. Their need is to 
bring theory to the test of the concrete instance 
in life. The concrete instance is based upon 
the experience of a person in a world of persons. 
And there is an element in personality which 
at least since the days of Kant must be recog- 
nized as existing in its own right. It is this 
element of personality which we feel is needed 
to complete and ground a true philosophy of 
change. Such a system was worked out to 
great completeness in America by Borden 
Parker Bowne under the name of Personalism. 
We have presumed here to call it a system of 
personal realism. 

Acknowledgments are due to my colleagues 
Professors Ulrey, Dixon, and Healey of the 
University of Southern California, to M. Poin- 
care, vice-Rector of the Sorbonne, and to Pro- 
fessor Bergson. 

It is not pleasant to disagree with one to 
whom there is a sense of personal obligation 
linked with so profound an admiration and 
esteem. 

These considerations are not offered in a 
spirit of contention nor as an attempt at finality, 
but in the humble hope that they may be not 
altogether without value in that conflict of 
ideas by which comes the more perfect state- 
ment of truth. 

m 



INTRODUCTION 

Acknowledgment should be made to the following 
firms for courtesies in connection with the quotations 
used in this book: 

Henry Holt & Co., publishers of Creative Evolution, by 
Henri Bergson. 

The Macmillan Company for quotations from Bergson's 
Matter and Memory; and Time and Free Will; also Bo- 
sanquet's Value and Destiny of the Individual. 

G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, for quotations from 
Bergson's Metaphysics. 

Charles Scribner's Sons for quotations from Poincare's 
Science and Method. 

Houghton Mifflin Company for Lucy Larcom's poem 
"A Strip of Blue." 

The Yale University Press for quotations from Hock- 
ing's Meaning of God. 

Lane for Naidu's "Suttee" from the Golden Threshold. 

Dana, Estes & Co. for Knowles's "The Tenant" from 
On Life's Stairway. 

The University of Chicago Press for quotations from 
Coe's Psychology of Religion. 

Mean, Paris, for quotations from Piat's La Personne 
Humaine. 

Open Court Publishing Company for Lane's translation 
of Herder's poem "Self." 

Thomas Bird Mosher for the poem "Sometimes," to be 
found in The Rose Jar, by Thomas S. Jones, Jr. 

The Author. 
Paris, Aprfl, 1919. 

87 



SECTION I 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE 



CHAPTER I 
BERGSON'S DEFINITION OF BEING 

In any system of philosophy, the definitions 
of being, reality, and life are more important 
than any house of speculation that may be built 
upon them. The definition is fundamental, 
and by it the remainder of the system must 
stand or fall. It is, then, important to any 
critical review of the Bergsonian philosophy 
that we should seek the exact definition which 
is given to being, reality, and life. 

The foremost clue to this definition will be 
given us if we can ascertain first of all the aim of 
the author. Bergson aims in his definition of 
matter to avoid the chief difficulty which besets 
materialism. This difficulty is the unavoid- 
able skepticism which arises from the affirmation 
of a reality which exists independent of all 
intelligence, and which ends in the denial of 
knowledge. This is his endeavor when he 
presents the definition of matter in this fashion: 

Matter in our view is an aggregate of images, and by 

image we mean a certain existence which is more than 

that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than 

that which the realist calls a thing — an existence placed 

31 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

half way between the "thing" and the representation. 
This conception of matter is simply that of common sense. 1 

Uncertainty in the Definition of 
Matter 
However much we may sympathize with the 
attempt thus to overcome the age-long dispute 
in philosophy, one can scarcely feel satisfied 
with a solution which seems so largely verbal. 
Though strictly defining the meaning of the 
term "images," the common connotation of the 
word is different, and this shadow of meaning 
creeps into Bergson's discussion. The confusion 
thus created becomes most apparent when he 
comes to define the relation of matter to per- 
sonality or spirit. 

I call matter the aggregate of images, and perception of 
matter these same images referred to the eventual action of 
one 'particular image, my body. 2 

Here is a system which I term my perception of the 
universe, and which may be entirely altered by a very 
slight change in a certain privileged image — my body. 
This image occupies the center; by it all the others are 
conditioned; at each of its movements everything changes, 
as though by the turn of the kaleidoscope. Here, on the 
other hand, are the same images, but referred each one to 
itself; influencing each other no doubt, but in such a man- 
ner that the effect is always in proportion to the cause: 
this is what I term the universe. 3 



1 Matter and Memory, pp. vii-viii. 

2 Ibid., p. 8. 

3 Ibid., p. 12. 



DEFINITION OF BEING 

In this case we have the same term, "image," 
applied to two systems, to that of perception 
or thought which later becomes memory or 
spirit, and to that of matter as independent 
existence. The question at once arises as to 
the validity of this double use of the term. 
Certainly, no questions existed previously which 
do not remain under the disguise of words. 
Either self is identical with matter or it is not. 
As an image in the sense of one body among 
others it might be, but if we have a mind for 
that which transcends materiality, we still have 
two worlds, and have not advanced by our 
definition. What Bergson seems to have hoped 
by this device was to obtain a suspension of 
judgment or truce in hostilities whereby we 
will accept things as they appear to common 
sense and not push the remorseless logic of the 
mind to either the extreme of materialistic 
agnosticism or idealistic subjectivism. The 
great question is how can we stop by fiat and 
be satisfied with the truce of ambiguous terms? 

In still another passage he defines matter as 
the inverse of movement, which is life. As 
steam from a vessel escapes into the air, the 
condensed drops of water fall back, opposing 
themselves to the rising vapor. The drops 
represent matter and the steam spirit, or life. 
He says: 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

In reality, life is a movement, materiality is the inverse 
movement and each of these two movements is simple, the 
matter which divides the world being an undivided flux, 
and undivided also the life that runs through it, cutting 
out in it living beings along its track. Of these two cur- 
rents the second runs counter to the first, but the first 
obtains, all the same, something from the second. 4 The 
movement is of the very essence of reality. 6 

4 Creative Evolution, pp. 249, 250. 

6 "If matter so far as extended in space is to be defined (as 
we believe it must) as a present which is always beginning 
again, inversely our present is the very materiality of our ex- 
istence, that is to say, a system of sensations and movements, 
and nothing else" (Matter and Memory, p. 178). 

"Each of these qualities resolves itself, on analysis, into 
an enormous number of elementary movements. Whether 
we see it in vibrations or whether we represent it in any 
other way, one fact is certain, it is that every quality is 
change. In vain, moreover, shall we seek beneath the change 
the thing which changes: it is always provisionally, and in 
order to satisfy our imagination, that we attach the move- 
ment to a mobile. The mobile flies forever before the pur- 
suit of science, which is concerned with mobility alone. In 
the smallest discernable fraction of a second, in the almost 
instantaneous conception of a sensible quality, there may be 
trillions of oscillations which repeat themselves. The perma- 
nence of a sensible quality consists in this repetition of move- 
ments, as the persistence of life consists in a series of palpita- 
tions. The primal function of perception is precisely to 
grasp a series of elementary changes under the form of a 
quality or of a simple state, by a work of condensation. The 
greater the power of acting bestowed upon an animal species, 
the more numerous, probably, are the elementary changes 
that its faculty of perceiving concentrates into one of its 
instants. And the progress must be continuous in nature, 
from the beings that vibrate almost in unison with the oscil- 

34 



DEFINITION OF BEING 

When we consider still further Bergson's 
claim that matter is simply "run-down" or 
exhausted life, we see how great is the need for 
clarifying definition and analysis, for in Berg- 
son's scheme of things both matter and life 
spring from a common creator in which the 
mechanical order is opposed to the living order, 
and is likewise produced by it. 

He says: 

All our analyses show us in life, an effort to remount 
the incline that matter descends. In that, they reveal to 
us the possibility, the necessity even, of a process the 
inverse of materiality, creative of matter by its interruption 
alone. 6 

On this basis life could not create matter until 
it already had some matter to oppose it. But 
this shakes our original structure to its founda- 
tions because it raises the question we presumed 
settled at the start. Instead of allowing us to 
assume that motion is original, it forces us to 
weigh whether it is matter or movement or life 
that is original. We shall find ourselves philo- 
sophically in the situation of the man who 
could find no way out except by lifting himself 
on his own bootstraps. 

lations of the ether, up to those that embrace trillions of these 
oscillations in the shortest of their simple perceptions" (Cre- 
ative Evolution, p. 301). 

6 Creative Evolution, p. 245. 
35 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Failure to Note a Real Distinction 
Between Matter and Spirit 

Any system of philosophy which attempts 
definitions that shall of themselves reconcile 
the dualism of spirit and matter is doomed to 
fall into a similar confusion. For philosophy 
and for life there is the one great secret, and 
that secret is beyond intelligible expression 
and analysis. The secret of life resides measur- 
ably within the depths of our own personalities. 
We have there exposed as by a flashlight a 
small portion of the garment of mystery. How 
can atoms of energy with their deducible heat 
units be traced into the purpose and will of the 
individual? Mr. Bergson recognizes this fact 
when in the introduction to Matter and Mem- 
ory 7 he denies a parallelism between the two 
series psychical and physiological. Why not, 
then, openly admit that in personality itself we 
chance upon the unexplained mystery of con- 
nection between the worlds of matter and of 
spirit? And if perchance we seek the solution of 
the larger mystery of efficient causation, it 
might be that personality in the "elan" would 
settle problems for which there is promise of 
settlement by no other conceivable premise. 

If we frankly recognize the dualism between 



8 Bowne, Metaphysics, p. 17. 



DEFINITION OF BEING 

matter and spirit, we can at least say that the 
mystery of their connection lies in the unsounded 
depths of personality. We need deny the 
reality of neither world. Spirit would then be 
simply that which acts, and matter that which 
is acted upon. 8 

Inasmuch as any clear consideration of the 
questions at issue in metaphysics must recog- 
nize the existence of the two realms of matter 
and spirit, it would seem undesirable for us to 
attempt to cover both by the use of a word 
constantly confusing. The classing of contra- 
dictory ideas under identical terms can never 
lead to clearness nor to the solution of the 
problem. An illustration of this method is to 
be found in the description of the self in Matter 
and Memory. 9 Here we have the self referred 

8 Bowne, Metaphysics, p. 17. 

9 "We will assume for the moment that we know nothing 
of theories of matter and theories of spirit, nothing of the 
discussions as to the reality or ideality of the external world. 
Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense 
of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened 
to them, unperceived when they are closed. All of these 
images act and react upon one another in all their elementary 
parts according to constant laws which I call laws of nature, 
and . . . the future of the images must be contained in their 
present and will add to them nothing new. 

"Yet there is one which is distinct from all the others, 
in that I do not know it only from without by perceptions, 
but from within by affections: it is my body. I examine 
the conditions in which these affections are produced :f I find 

37 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

to as one image among others, and further as 
an image that is given us in consciousness. 

that they always interpose themselves between the excita- 
tions that I receive from without and the movements which 
I am about to execute, as though they had some undefined 
influence on the final issue. I pass in review my different 
affections: it seems to me that each of them contains, after 
its kind, an invitation to act, with at the same time leave to 
wait and even to do nothing. I look closer: I find movements 
begun but not executed, the indication of a more or less useful 
decision, but not that constraint which precludes choice. I 
call up, I compare my recollections: I remember that every- 
where in the organic world, I have thought I saw this same 
sensibility appear at the very moment, when nature having 
conferred upon the living being the power of mobility in 
space, gives warning to the species, by means of sensation, 
of the general dangers which threaten it, leaving to the indi- 
viduals the precautions necessary for escaping from them. 
Lastly, I interrogate my consciousness as to the part which 
it plays in affection: consciousness replies that it is present, 
indeed, in the form of feeling or of sensation, at all the steps 
in which I believe I take the initiative, and that it fades and 
disappears as soon as my activity, by becoming automatic, 
shows that consciousness is no longer needed. Therefore all 
these appearances are deceptive, or the act in which the 
effective state issues is not one of those which might be rig- 
orously deduced from antecedent phenomena, as a movement 
from a movement; and hence it really adds something new 
to the universe and to its history. Let us hold to the ap- 
pearances; I will formulate purely and simply what I feel and 
what I see: all seem to take place as if, in this aggregate of 
images which I call the universe, nothing really new could hap- 
pen except through the medium of certain particular images, 
the type of which is furnished me by my body. . . . The afferent 
nerves are images, the brain is an image, the disturbance 
traveling through the sensory nerves and propagated in the 

38 



DEFINITION OF BEING 

This self is referred to indifferently as "I," 
"body," "consciousness," and "representation." 
Following this description of matter as an 
aggregate of images among which images my 
body becomes (for me) a center, one feels moved 
to ask the following questions: If matter is an 
aggregate of images, and perception is the refer- 
ence to another image, which is myself, do we 
not remain in a world which is wholly phenom- 
enal? If we do not, then we cannot reach a 
realm of thought at all. 



brain is an image too. . . . Here are external images, then 
my body, and lastly, the changes brought about by my body 
in the surrounding images. I see plainly how external images 
influence the image that I call my body: they transmit move- 
ment to it, and I also see how this body influences external 
images; it gives back movement to them. My body is then, 
in the aggregate of the material world, an image which acts 
like other images, receiving and giving back movement, with, 
perhaps, this difference only that my body appears to choose 
within certain limits the manner in which it shall restore 
what it receives. But how could my body in general and my 
nervous system in particular beget the whole or a part of 
my representation of the universe? You may say that my 
body is matter or that it is an image; the word is of no im- 
portance. If it is matter, it is a part of the material world, 
and the material world, consequently, exists around it and 
without it. If it is an image, that image can give but what 
has been put into it; and since it is by hypothesis the image 
of my body only, it would be absurd to expect to get from it 
that of the whole universe. My body, an object destined 
to move other objects, is, then, a center of action; it cannot 
give birth to a representation" (pp. 1-5). 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

As "aggregate of images" cannot tell the 
whole story of matter with its visible unity, 
so neither can "perception" account on this 
basis for the processes of thought, of purpose, 
of will, which are the finest and most real 
elements of experience. The moment we strive 
for a general term which shall represent both 
matter and spirit we have emptied its meaning 
to the vanishing point by one of those "efforts 
at intellectualization" which Bergson so greatly 
deplores. 

The actual line of demarcation is pronounced, 
and the controversy of philosophy must be 
settled by clear thinking rather than by ambigu- 
ous terms. The nature of the strife cannot 
thus be changed any more than could the 
desperate points at issue in the great American 
war be lost in the reference to it by a humorous 
writer as "the late unpleasantness." 

From this Definition of Matter Arises 
Confusion in the Meaning of Self 
Out of this confusion in the definition of 
being arises a further confusion as to the mean- 
ing of personality, or self. The self is referred 
to under the general term "body." Yet we say 
"my body," and "I," in contrast with my body. 
This may be a convenient form of expression 
if we are trying to break down the borders 

40 



DEFINITION OF BEING 

between materiality and spirit. The device 
may enable me to group my body as an image 
with other bodies that comprise the material 
world, but the world has long since discarded 
the crude conception of organs of the body as 
the seat of the soul. There is great question 
whether any progress is to be made by recurring 
to the old expedient. According to Bergson's 
usage, the self is alternately matter and spirit 
as best suits the occasion. But he still further 
differentiates spirit from perception by making 
it always bound to time flown. He says: "It 
is in very truth within matter that pure per- 
ception places us, and it is really into spirit 
that we penetrate by means of memory. 10 

Has spirit, then, no "now"? Does it not 
take its seat until perception is a thing of the 
past? Does it not, rather, enter into the 
bodily channels through which it must reach 
matter to determine what and how much it 
shall perceive? It might be conceived a great 
spiritual and scientific blessing to the world 
if men could perceive things as they are, but 
unfortunately the human personality so warps 
its perception that in many cases the man per- 
ceives only that which he wishes or expects. 
In all cases involving exactness of perception, 
allowance must needs be made for the "personal 

10 Matter and Memory, p. 235. 

41 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

equation." In courts of law the prepossessions, 
expectations, and self-interests of the individual 
are recognized as having important bearing 
on what the witness honestly thinks he saw. 
Here is a side of perception which may be incon- 
venient to consider, but which nevertheless 
must be met if we are to go any distance along 
the road to the solution of the problems involved. 
By the Bergsonian method perception is 
placed in contrast with memory or spirit. From 
matter identified with perception in such wise 
as to include spirit we leap to spirit as memory, 
and memory is considered as the opposite of 
matter. Perception is supposed to be clear, 
simple, bearing only truth, being of the nature 
of reality, very reality itself. No recognition 
is given to the fact that "pure" perception may 
be mistaken perception, or at least may become 
the basis of mistaken intellectualization. Some 
way must be left in which it is possible to 
account for the difference of perception between 
the trained and the untrained mind and eye. 
The botanist, for instance, perceives a hundred 
things about the plant he discovers by the way- 
side which do not appear to the man who is 
ignorant of botany. The perceptions of the 
common man not only differ from those of the 
trained chemist, but they differ in such degree 
as to make of scant value to the scientific world 
42 



DEFINITION OF BEING 

the perception of the untrained. The value of 
the simplest perception is found to lie in great 
part in the quality and training of the perceiving 
mind. No account is taken of the fact that 
elementary perception must appeal to memory 
and thought for correction. As a matter of 
fact, any attempt to divide the two is an illus- 
tration of vicious "intellectualization." Per- 
ception is taken as the brighter light; memory 
is but its inefficient penumbra. Perception is 
more real as being the very heart of reality; 
memory, or spirit, is only a picture of what has 
been. Throughout this play of forces the "I" 
passes like a shuttle to and fro, becoming alter- 
nately matter and spirit, but never a self- 
directing identity above the flux of experience. 

The Idea of "Duration" Alone is 

Insufficient to Solve the Conflict 

between Mind and Matter 

In so far as the philosophy of change has 

found any solution of the difficulty thus raised 

it has provided it in its doctrine of duration. 

Matter is supposed to be in space, spirit to be extra- 
spatial; there is no possible transition between them. 
But if, in fact, the humblest function of spirit is to bind 
together the successive moments of the duration of things, 
if it is by this that it comes into contact with matter and 
by this also that it is first of all distinguished from matter, 
we can conceive an infinite number of degrees between 

43 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

matter and fully developed spirit — a spirit capable of 
action which is not only undetermined, but also reasonable 
and reflective. 11 

Pure duration is the form which the succession of our 
conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when 
it refrains from separating its present state from its former 
states. For this purpose it may not be entirely absorbed 
in the passing sensation or idea; for then on the contrary, 
it would no longer endure. 12 

It will thus be seen that under the term 
"duration" Bergson implies the self -identifying 
quality of human personality. It is distin- 
guished from matter, it distinguishes itself from 
matter; it survives the fleeting states of percep- 
tion and binds the various successions into a 
harmony of experience. And so far as we can 
understand his philosophy, this element of 
duration is the unique possession of the spirit. 
This may at first glance be questioned but 
appears more likely upon reflection. When he 
speaks of duration in matter it seems to have a 
meaning relative to the self -identifying qualities 
of the individual rather than to any original or 
intrinsic power in matter itself. Thus, though 
he does not perhaps avow it in words, he brings 
the mysterious relationship between matter and 
spirit to the only place to which in the end it 



11 Matter and Memory, pp. 295-296. 

12 Time and Free Will, p. 100. 

44 



DEFINITION OF BEING 

can be brought, the alembic of human person- 
ality. 

The Resort to a Theory of Vibration 
as the Basis of Explanation 

An account of Bergson's definition of matter 
would, however, be incomplete without a con- 
sideration of his doctrine of movement as the 
basis of reality. 13 

13 "Analysis resolves it [matter] into elementary vibrations, 
the shortest of which are of very slight duration, almost 
vanishing, but not nothing" (Creative Evolution p. 201). 

"REAL MOVEMENT IS RATHER THE TRANS- 
FERENCE OF A STATE THAN A THING. . . Now, 
certainly the difference is irreducible (as we have shown in 
an earlier work) — [T. & F. W.] between quality on the one 
hand and pure quantity on the other. But this is just the 
question: Do real movements present merely differences of 
quantity or are they not quality itself, vibrating, so to speak, 
internally, and beating time for its own existence through 
an often incalculable number of moments? ... If our belief 
in a more or less homogeneous substratum of sensible quali- 
ties has any ground, this can only be found in an act which 
makes us seize or divine, in quality itself, something which 
goes beyond sensation, as if this sensation itself were preg- 
nant with details suspected yet unperceived. Its objectivity 
— that is to say, what it contains over and above what it 
yields up — must then consist, as we have foreshadowed, 
precisely in the immense multiplicity of the movement which 
it executes, so to speak, within itself as a chrysalis. Motion- 
less on the surface, in its very depths it lives and vibrates" 
(Matter and Memory, pp. 267-270). 

"To movement, then, everything will be restored, and into 
movement everything will be resolved" (Creative Evolution, 
p. 250). 

45 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

By adopting the theory that movement is 
original the philosophy of change seizes by the 
horns the ancient dilemma between a self- 
creating Absolute, and an Unknowable involved 
in an infinite regress. By assuming that motion 
is itself never begun but was from eternity we 
seem to have a sufficient ground for the world 



"As a matter of fact, no one represents to himself the 
relation between quantity and quality in any other way 
[than as one merely of vibration]. To believe in realities 
distinct from that which is perceived, is above all to recog- 
nize that the order of our perceptions depends on them and 
not on us. There must be, then, within the perceptions 
which fill a given moment, the reason of what will happen 
in the following moment. And mechanism only formulates 
this belief with more precision when it affirms that the states 
of matter can be deduced one from the other. It is true that 
this deduction is possible only if we discover, beneath the 
apparent heterogeneity of sensible qualities, homogeneous 
elements which lend themselves to calculation. But, on the 
other hand, if these elements are external to the qualities of 
which they are meant to explain the regular order, they can 
no longer render the service demanded of them, because then 
the qualities must be supposed to come to overlie them by a 
kind of miracle, and cannot correspond to them unless we 
bring in some preestablished harmony. So, do what we will, 
we cannot avoid placing those movements within these quali- 
ties, in the form of internal vibrations, and then considering 
the vibrations as less homogeneous, and the qualities as less 
heterogeneous, than they appear, and, lastly, attributing the 
difference of aspect in the two terms to the necessity which 
lies upon what may be called an endless multiplicity of con- 
tracting into a duration too narrow to admit of a separation 
of its moments" (Matter and Memory, pp. 270-272). 
46 



DEFINITION OF BEING 

of matter which relieves us from the embarrass- 
ment of the ancient question which remained 
after assuming that all began with a fire-mist, or 
a jiggling of atoms, and desired to know who 
jiggled the atoms and how the first impulse was 
given. We see at once that on such a theory 
we begin by investing both matter and motion 
with eternity. There is strong temptation at 
this moment to embarrass the situation with 
dialectic. Doubts will come as to how, if 
motion has been from all eternity, there can be 
any progress at all, or how from such a starting 
point we can obtain the benefits of evolution. 
If all the motion that now is is the exact equiva- 
lent of the motion that always has been we have 
still to account for the increment of evolution. 
As a matter of fact, transcendence of time can 
be the possession of personality alone, and not 
of matter nor of motion, if we are going to 
retain any such thing as progress or evolution 
possessing any meaning for thinking and pur- 
posive beings. Any other course must inevi- 
tably land us in the darkest materialism. 

Under this theory that motion is original, 
the "vital elan," life, the universe, and God 
are only an intricate system of vibrations. Nor 
will it serve any useful purpose to disclaim our 
materialistic conclusion, because when we 
think of movements or vibrations we are com- 

47 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

pelled to think in materialistic terms. Move- 
ments are movements of something in space, 
vibrations are vibrations of material atoms. 
Even if we go farther in our work of idealization 
and speak instead of "aeons," "electrons," or 
"vortex rings," we shall not escape the materi- 
alistic implication. We may thereby complete 
an interesting intellectual exercise, and may be 
giving wide range to our imaginations, but we 
shall only deceive ourselves if we think we have 
delivered ourselves in any wise from the body 
of this materialistic death. 

When we place all our hope forlorn on a 
matter of vibrations it is not beyond the bounds 
of reason that we should further demand, 
"Vibrations of what?" Are these vibrations 
material or spiritual? Are they vibrations of 
atoms, aeons, electrons, or of monads, spiritual 
influences? Are we witnessing the movement 
of forces which enter into what we know as 
matter — that force which is forever blocking 
and hindering the ascent of life, the conquest of 
the spirit — or are we actually witnessing magic, 
a dance of the gods? If it should be the latter, 
we are all at sea because we have passed beyond 
the kingdom of science. Whichever horn of the 
dilemma we choose to take there is nothing to 
save us from landing in the bald materialism of 
ancient atomism. In the case of vibrating 

48 



DEFINITION OF BEING 

"atoms" or "aeons" the only reason we think 
we have made progress toward a solution of 
our difficulty is because we have imaginatively 
endowed a quaking infinitesimal of matter with 
all the powers, occult, purposive, and intelligent, 
which in our scientific enthusiasm we have 
denied to God. Unless we can identify motion 
with intelligence we have not been helped 
along the dusty distances by any assumption 
of motion as the fundamental reality. 

It will at once be seen that under this theory 
not only matter, but perception, mental reac- 
tion, reflection, the various universe — all become 
merely a problem in variation of wave-lengths, 
a difference in speed of vibrations in certain 
somewhat fictional infinitesimals of matter. 
Of course, in order to get the desired intelligible 
and spiritual results, there must be in these pri- 
mal or elementary bodies or forces certain 
intelligent and spiritual elements, but it is not 
permitted to speak of these, nor to allow them 
any standing. "No Passing" is written across 
each one of them. If these needed elements 
were given a place, they might prove too much 
and might become embarrassing to our doctrine 
that movement is original. In keeping with 
this theory, one speed of vibration gives red, 
another blue, the absence of vibration gives 
black, while purple spells confusion. As the 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

dance goes faster or slows down we go from 
light to sound, to taste and smell. In this 
novel and fascinating arrangement wherein all 
qualitative changes are reducible to quanti- 
tative movements, what is to hinder the tracing 
of those personal qualities which distinguish 
one man from another to a slightly different 
period of vibration? The ancient Pythago- 
rean speculation rises like a ghost out of the 
dim and distant past. It might be that we 
each of us possess our "keynote." The long 
outlawed reflections of astrology might return 
to the field to convince us that character and 
destiny, criminality or saintliness are not, as we 
have thought, a matter of personal praise or 
blame, but one of sympathetic vibration in 
accordance with which one moves in keeping 
with his horoscope to his keynote in the well- 
timed music of the spheres. All that one seems 
to need is a touch of imagination — and credu- 
lity. 

One specter remains at the feast, however, 
to disturb our mental harmony: it is the stub- 
born question, Has intuition, "pure intuition," 
or perception, which is reality, given us this 
result, or have we arrived in the quagmire by 
a process of gross "intellectualization"? This 
is an uncomfortable thought, for, by the terms 
of this philosophy, rationalization leads away 

50 



DEFINITION OF BEING 

both from life and from reality, and the old 
problem remains. In spite of the warning 
that if we are to reach reality it is dangerous to 
think, or intellectualize, we cannot avoid the 
abyss of reflection. In our slumbers of vibra- 
tory self-repose and hypnotic world-satisfac- 
tion, alas, what dreams may come! This re- 
flection is forced upon us; in pure perception, 
or in any other kind of perception, we are not 
conscious of vibrations at all, but of colors, 
sights, sounds, and bodies which the moment 
we perceive them are given an intelligible sig- 
nificance and a place in our world. It is plain 
that we arrived at a belief in the vibratory 
theory, not by that which we have perceived, 
nor by that which the scientists have perceived, 
using the term "perception" in the Bergsonian 
sense. It becomes clear that we have reached 
our theory by one of those processes of intel- 
lectualization, concerning which Mr. Bergson 
has warned us as leading us directly away from 
the reality. It is very certain that whatever 
neo-realism or any other kind of realism may be 
able to do for us^ it cannot by any principles of 
realistic perception establish for us a world 
founded on an atomic or vibratory theory. 
Our choice between them and the absolute ideal- 
ists (if choose we must) would needs be a choice 
between idealistic pantheism on the one hand 
51 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

and idealistic materialism 14 on the other. Any 
one having paid the price of admission can 
attend either show. Neither one promises to 
give much satisfaction beyond mere passing 
entertainment. 

One thing is certain, however much the 
researches of science may be able to establish 
the fact of the vibratory changes of matter and 
their relations to changes in perception of 
qualities, the question of how these vibrations get 
into thought as diverse qualities of being has not 
been touched. We certainly have never yet 
explained anything by discovering another 
word with which to describe it. This much 
must be admitted, though failure to understand 
it has filled the world with ponderous and 
tedious volumes which serve no better purpose 
than 

"To cramp the student at his desk, 
And make old bareness picturesque" 

with the moss of high-sounding opinion. 

Why do vibrations moving at "m," "n," or 
"y" feet per second over the same field stir 
emotions of patriotism that inspire men to 
press unflinchingly up the slope of death to 
endure the ultimate sacrifice with glad and 



14 We beg to be forgiven this contradictory term, but can 
think of none other so expressive of our meaning. 

52 



DEFINITION OF BEING 

willing hearts? Why are vibrations say at 
"n" to be interpreted into the sweetest voice 
that man ever knows, that which sang above 
his cradle? Why do certain other vibrations 
moving at say "y" speed mean to me the 
dearest face that my eyes look upon? A little 
reflection, Horatio, will show one things not 
dreamed of in the vibratory philosophy. This 
world of personal meaning and interpretation 
has many realities which can neither be ex- 
plained by rates of atomic vibration, nor can 
they find satisfactory ground in any origin 
which is pure movement. When Bergson hits 
upon the doctrine of duration to solve this 
problem he is very near to the truth, but he 
cannot reap the rich reward of such a theory 
while he remains in the toils of any abstract 
or impersonal "duration" whatever. The only 
way out is to assume duration in the only place 
where it possesses intelligible meaning, namely, 
in the relating self. 



53 



CHAPTER II 

THE DEFINITION OF MEMORY 
AND LIFE 

Let us turn to the discussion of memory and 
its relation to matter and perception. We are 
told: 

If it is memory alone that lends to perception its sub- 
jective character, the philosophy of matter must aim in the 
first instance, we said, at eliminating the contributions of 
memory. We must now add, that as pure perception 
gives us the whole, or at least the essential part, of matter 
(since the rest comes from memory and is super-added to 
matter), it follows that memory must be, in principle, a 
power absolutely independent of matter. If, then, spirit 
is a reality, it is here, in the phenomenon of memory, that 
we may come into touch with it experimentally. And 
hence any attempt to derive pure memory from an oper- 
ation of the brain should reveal on analysis a radical 
illusion. 1 

Again he says : 

It is within matter that pure perception places us and 
it is really into spirit that we penetrate by means of 
memory. 2 



1 Matter and Memory, p. 81. 

2 Ibid., p. 235. 

54 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

The Meaning of "Pure" Memory 
Let us consider, first of all, the use made of the 
term "pure" memory and what might possibly 
be its meaning and connotation for a system of 
philosophy. 

Bergson helps to clear the way for us by 
asserting 3 that by this term he does not mean 
that which the psychologists ordinarily treat 
as memory. He declares that the meaning 
ordinarily given to the term concerns only 
mental habit, and not memory as he wishes to 
think of it. What then is memory? Memory 
is the intersection of mind and matter. Though 
he does not so state it, memory is a person in 
the act of perceiving. Now, "pure" memory 
is experience, not in the moment of perception, 
but experience after the event has been related 
to the self. At the farthest reach of the self 
in the direction of matter stands "pure" per- 
ception which entirely lacks this self-relating 
element, and cannot be distinguished from 
matter. At the opposite pole stands "pure" 
memory, in which the particular event has 
been related to the self, to the past, and to the 
universe, in other words, the experience has 
become a part of personality. Just as "pure" 
perception stands related to matter, so "pure" 



3 Matter and Memory, pp. 94-95, passim. 
55 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

memory stands related to spirit, that is, it is 
not to be distinguished from it. If we might 
be permitted to diagram the situation, it would 
appear thus: 











T 






TP 


P 




u 






ue 


e 




r 






rr 


r 




e' 






e'c 


c 








M 


e 


e 


M 


M 


S 


a 


P 


P 


e 


e 


p 


t 


t 


t 


m 


m 


i 


t 


i 


i 


o 


o 


r 


e 


o 


o 


r 


r 


i 


r 

1 


n 

1 


n 

1 


y 

1 


y 

1 


t 

1 



It is obvious by the diagram that the final 
term of connection between matter and spirit 
is missing. This is because the mistake is made 
of identifying "pure" memory with spirit and 
so leaving our conclusion incomplete. "Pure" 
memory and spirit may be considered as pos- 
sessing identity analogous to that possessed by 
"pure" perception and matter; but if they are 
identical, we make no progress by using varying 
terms, and are not justified in making distinc- 
tions without a difference. The instructive 
part of the diagram is, that all the way from 
spirit up to and including "pure" perception 
we have wholly the terms of personal experi- 
56 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

ence. So far as there is any movement at all 
it is on the part of the human subject. The 
description becomes then but a measure of the 
degrees by which the person knows his world. 
The two realities that stand out are the world 
of matter and the person or spirit. The inter- 
vening spaces are but the symbols of intellect- 
ual analysis, the description of a personal 
realism. For, while "pure" perception may 
be taken as practically coincident with matter, 
and "pure" memory as coincident with spirit 
or personality, yet in concrete experience we 
know only perception and "pure" memory, 
memory having slipped out in the shuffle as a 
meaningless term. In truth, we cannot in 
practice divide perception from "pure" memory, 
for the relating faculty is busy in the very 
midst of perception, and even goes before it. 
We are conscious of the "I" before we are 
conscious of material fact, and we perceive the 
fact in its relation to ourselves. We carry our- 
self into it, to use a Bergsonian expression. 
What we are determines in no inconsiderable 
degree what we shall see, what our perceptions 
shall be. Without this relating capacity we 
shall not get a perception at all, for we should 
then be incapable of any experience of the out- 
side world. Personality is this mysterious 
"synthesis of 'pure' memory and 'pure' per- 

57 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

ception; that is to say, of mind and matter," 
and this is what we mean by the term "personal 
realism." 

Of the Relation between Perception 
and Memory 

Bergson acknowledges the purely hypotheti- 
cal nature of "pure" perception in the following 
terms: 

Our perception, we said, is originally in things rather 
than in the mind, without us rather than within. The 
several kinds of perception correspond to so many direc- 
tions actually marked out in reality. But, we added, 
this perception, which coincides with its object, exists 
rather in theory than in fact; it could only happen if we 
were shut up within the present moment. In concrete 
perception memory intervenes, and the subjectivity of 
sensible qualities is due precisely to the fact that our 
consciousness, which begins by being only memory, 
prolonged a plurality of moments into each other, con- 
tracting them into a single intuition. 4 

We believe that Bergson's definition looks 
in the right direction, but we do not believe 
that it is stated with sufficient clearness, nor 
that it is adequate and satisfying. The average 
mind will ask certain questions that, unpro- 
vided for, will be found embarrassing. It 
is clear that if memory is the intersection of 
mind and matter, we can from mere intersec- 
tion, keeping strictly to our figure of speech, 

* Matter and Memory, pp. 291, $92, 
58 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

get nothing as a result that will be of a different 
order than the two elements already provided. 
If we are going to use memory as a term in which 
to express spirit, there is a question as to how 
it can be the product of mind and matter. 5 
That is to say, if we are serious in putting for- 
ward this dictum, our definition acquires 
standing because we have given to the term 
"mind" the content of "spirit." We cannot 
by combining two material things get a third 
of a higher and spiritual order. Pushing the 
case a step farther, should we say that memory 
is the result of the intersection of mind and 
matter or that it is the remembrance of such 
intersection, we are met with the problem of 
what or who does the remembering. Bergson 
has positively shown us in another 6 place that 
the body can in no sense be considered the 
storehouse of sensation. We have, then, re- 
moved the possibility of considering "body" in 

5 Our difficulty here lies in the common meaning of the 
word "memory." We cannot use the word intelligently 
without thinking of it as related to something which is past. 
Bergson uses it in distinction from "pure" memory with the 
meaning we ordinarily assign to perception. The moment an 
event is past it has already been related to the self-experience 
and has thus become "pure" memory. The trouble in terms 
arises from the attempt to secure a word which will be a general 
term and which will also express what we mean by person. 
In the nature of the case such an effort is doomed to confusion. 

6 Matter and Memory, pp. 233, 234; p. 79; pp. 136, 137. 

59 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

the loose way in which we have previously 
hidden the fact of personality. Whither, then, 
can we fly? 

When we stop to reflect, we recognize two 
requirements, the presence of which makes 
patent and meaningful this term "memory.' ' 
First, it is evident that memory which is not 
memory of concrete facts or experiences is 
memory of nothing. It may be claimed that 
in making this statement we are going back to 
the meaning of the term which has been speci- 
fically repudiated. But this will be not quite 
the fact. If memory is to be the relating of the 
past to the present or the future, it must be the 
relating of specific experiences. 

The second requirement in memory of which 
we spoke is this. Memory is nothing apart 
from a remembering individual or personality. 
Memories that are only generalities experienced 
by generalities would convey no definable 
meaning. It is because memory is the rela- 
ting of concrete events to a concrete self-iden- 
tifying unit that it comes to possess an assign- 
able meaning. When we have come thus far 
the discovery is forced upon us that what we 
have been considering under the name of "pure" 
memory is really expressed under the term 
"person.' ' To us this term is far more apt and 
less conducive of confusion. 

60 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

That, then, which stands above the inter- 
section of mind and matter, that which gathers 
the succession of experiences up into itself, 
that which Bergson posits under the figure of 
the rolling snowball of experience, that which 
brings to the present every moment of its past, 
and that which is able to act with reference to 
an unexperienced future, is what we really mean 
by the term "person." 

After telling us repeatedly that perception 
is the coincidence of the perceiver and the thing 
perceived; that we attain reality by "putting 
ourselves in things"; that this relation is the 
reality, we are hardly prepared to be told that 
this coincidence is not a fact but, rather, a 
theory. But this is what seems to accrue and 
this result must be held to spring from the 
previous attempt to unite the world of thought 
and thing under an abstraction. Thought and 
thing are concretely related only in a thinking 
subject. 7 

7 "Let us, on the contrary, banish all preconceived idea of 
interpreting or measuring; let us place ourselves face to face 
with immediate reality; at once we find that there is no 
impassable barrier, no essential difference, no real distinction, 
even, between perception and the thing perceived, between 
quality and movement. Our perception, we said, is originally 
in things rather than in the mind, without us rather than 
within. The several kinds of perception correspond to so 
many directions actually marked out in reality. But, we 
added, this perception, which coincides with its object, exists 
61 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

That the idea of personality is necessary to 
bring these definitions of perception and mem- 
ory out from the region of unclear ideas becomes 
more apparent as we consider them in contrast 
and relation. He says: 

If we take perception in its concrete form, as a synthesis 
of pure memory and pure perception, that is to say, of 
mind and matter, we compress within its narrowest limits 
the problem of the union of soul and body. 8 

It is apparent from this quotation that the 
term pure perception has no concrete meaning, 
and like the symbol of an algebraic equation, 
is used for purposes of argument and analysis. 
We learn that pure perception, which is indis- 
tinguishable from matter, which coincides with 
matter, has only a theoretical value, never 
existing as a concrete fact. Thus that "pure 
perception which is not to be distinguished from 
matter" has vanished into thin air. Would we 
be justified in saying that with it had gone 

rather in theory than in fact: it could only happen if we were 
shut up in the present movement. In concrete perception 
memory intervenes, and the subjectivity of sensible qualities 
is due precisely to the fact that our consciousness, which begins 
by being only memory, prolongs a plurality of movements 
into each other, contracting them into a simple intuition. 
Consciousness and matter, body and soul, were thus seen to 
meet each other in perception" (Matter and Memory, pp. 
291, 292). 

8 Matter and Memory, p. 325. 
62 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

that material world on which are based so many 
hopes of explanation? It would seem as if in 
this apparently innocent statement we had 
gone the way of all absolute idealism or subject- 
ivism. We should scarcely fare better with our 
definition of pure memory did we not in floun- 
dering about in the metaphysical sea strike our 
feet on the recognized shore of personality. 
Here as in Lowell's verses, we 

"Can but exult to feel beneath our feet, 
That long stretched vainly down the yielding deeps, 
The shock and sustenance of solid earth." 

Pure memory, removed from the event and 
become merely a relation of experience to 
experience, would also vanish, leaving no trace 
btehind, did we not unconsciously give it a 
content which the term does not imply. One 
state of consciousness could take no cognizance 
of preceding or succeeding states, could have no 
sense of succession or past, unless it were raised 
out of the level of successions, where it belongs, 
into something else. That something else, 
abiding above the succession of experiences, 
maintaining its self-identity in the midst of all 
changes that can come, is the personality. A 
state could not relate other states to itself 
because it could not abide to do the relating, 
nor could it retain its identity while receiving 
63 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

them into itself. There is neither unity nor 
intelligence without taking the term "pure" 
memory from its usual and also from its general 
meaning, and endowing it with the concrete 
qualities of personality. Bergson gives it these 
qualities, but does not provide for them in his 
definition. 

The Assumed Independence of Memory 

and Matter is Not Tenable on 

these Terms 

Unless we move forward to the assumption 
of personality as fundamental to experience 
and life, we cannot abide by the claims which 
are set forth for memory, as independent of 
matter. 9 

We cannot by a method of analysis make 
memory absolutely independent of matter if 
we begin and end by defining it as the intersec- 
tion of mind and matter. When we use these 
terms mind is thought of as spirit or pure 
memory. Memory is then put as the least 
possible remove from perception. Pure mem- 
ory as existing apart from present perception, 
because it is really independent (in the sense of 
being not entirely dependent), self -relating 
unity, might be possible. But memory, as 
Bergson uses the term, must lie in precise or 

9 Matter and Memory, p. 81. 
64 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

concrete experiences. We are forced to explain 
then how things that are "absolutely inde- 
pendent" can be said to intersect, find common 
ground, and pass over into each other. Let 
it be understood that at this point we have no 
dispute with the facts of experience. Our 
quarrel is, rather, with the foregoing definition. 
Memory as akin to perception does hold a 
certain dependence upon the material world. 
So long as we keep our senses we shall not 
perceive a blank space where there is a stone 
wall, nor walk upon water as if it were dry land, 
nor pass through the partition of our house 
where there is no opening. Memory cannot 
be defined as the intersection of mind and matter 
without introducing the entire brood of material- 
istic conclusions which the philosophy of change 
sets out to avoid. Memory may spring from 
the reaction of a personality upon matter, 
which is a fundamentally different way of put- 
ting it. 

We cannot by this expedient of finite person- 
ality hope to find more than a temporary refuge 
from the metaphysical storm. If we are to 
find any basis of intelligibility, something 
beyond, akin both to matter and to human 
personality, upon whose intelligent creative 
will and purpose both mind and matter depend, 
must be affirmed. 

65 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Perhaps the ingenuity of human discovery 
may some day lay bare within the whirling 
vortices of atoms powers strangely mysterious 
to us now, 10 which will make less difficult the 
leap from what we term matter to that which 
we term God, but any creative force which is 
to give adequate explanation of our world 
cannot leave out intelligence nor the uniqueness 
of human purpose as it fulfills its desires, and 
therefore must contain within itself, in larger 
and more efficient measure, these self-same 
powers. 

Only by some such assumption are we per- 
mitted to arrive at any real independence 
between thought and thing. It is an independ- 
ence, not because the two things are of such 
nature that there are no means of interaction 
between them, but independent because they 
are creatively so endowed that personality, 
even though it be finite, may understand, 
utilize, and master in some measure the universe 
of which it is a part. 

The Metaphysical Bearing of the 
Xhings which Escape our 
Explanation 
One cannot travel far in metaphysical expla- 



10 For Biological Statement of the problem see Wilson, 
The Cell in Development and Inheritance (1911), pp. 431-434. 
66 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

nation without being troubled by insistent 
doubts and misgivings at the verities which are 
forever escaping the terms of his philosophy, 
the inadequacy which human expression always 
experiences when it attempts the explanation 
of life. A study of all the philosophies which 
have existed since the world began would 
disclose at least this common ground of opin- 
ion — that the eventual thing cannot be expressed. 
So far as this fact is concerned, it matters 
little whether we tie up our mystery in a bundle 
of words, and, casting it into the abyss, turn 
our backs, mumbling the equations of science 
rapidly, as a frightened peasant would tell 
his beads, or whether we sum up our mystery 
in the term "forces," or the "Unknowable," we 
cannot eradicate the fact of the existence of that 
which passes beyond our power of explanation. 
When it comes to mysteries, however, there 
is happily such a thing as choice of mysteries. 
We may, like Bassanio, choose the casket which 
shall decide our metaphysical fate. Here too 
there may not be wanting certain inscriptions 
by which wit and judgment may be guided in 
its choice. Personality is the one thing in 
common experience which baffles all powers of 
description and explanation. From it comes 
every event of unique or efficient causation that 
we can actually trace and identify. Within 
67 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

its depths lie hidden the strange mingling of 
mind with matter which we hope to explain. 
Bergson has called it the synthesis of pure 
memory and pure perception. We do not make 
it any more mysterious when we call it plainly 
personality. Such being the case, it might be 
found in the interests of clearness advisable to 
drop from terms merely technical and abstract 
to those of concreteness and actuality. Let us 
name the fundamental mystery of being person- 
ality. Let us recognize that the terms we use 
inadequately to describe it are like those of the 
functional psychologists, abstractions or sym- 
bols which assist in analyzing and rationalizing 
the fundamental and indivisible fact. 

Nor should it be lost from our view that we 
must assume another fundamental mystery 
before we can complete our system. That 
mystery is the existence of a personality behind 
the world of matter and of personalities. All 
will be found in the end to resolve itself into 
this final mystery. If we can assume this, the 
other mysteries fall marvelously into line. The 
unsolved dualism of life becomes then not a 
dualism or conflict between mind and matter, 
nor is it akin to that pluralism which renders 
the conflict universal, the hand of each being 
set against his brother; neither is it the dualism 
of good and evil, destined to go on forever: 

68 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

it is, rather, a dualism of contrasting wills, a 
dualism which exists with purposive and express 
consent of the supreme Intelligence whose 
purpose and aim seems to be the solution of 
dualism by a progress which gives meaning to 
all evolution, eventuating in a world of person- 
alities whose moral outlook and supremacy is 
like his own. 

The Definition of Life 
When we approach the consideration of 
Bergson's definition of life, we shall find him 
using several different expressions in which to 
convey his meaning. We find him thinking of 
life as the intersection of the two great inde- 
pendent streams of reality — matter and spirit. 
We shall find it described as "formidable 
thrust," or as "pure duration," or as "vital 
impulse." Life is an order of reality that is 
original, whereas matter is an order that is 
derived. 11 

One need not be unappreciative of the great 
modern debt to Bergson for his attempt 
scientifically to restate the familiar problems of 
philosophy, in noting the confusion likely to 
arise from any impersonal and abstract defi- 
nition of life, such as he has given us. 

He frequently describes life as a current 

11 Sc. Wildon Carr, The Philosophy of Change, p. 145. 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

which opposes itself to the stream of matter, 12 
divided into species and individuals by une- 
qual stresses of opposition. Again, the two 
streams of reality are matter and spirit and the 
very intersection of the two is life itself. In 
another connection we are told that "Life in 
general is mobility itself," 13 which leads us back 
to a coincidence with spirit. Again, "Regarded 
in what is its true essence, namely, as a tran- 
sition from species to species, life is a contin- 
ually growing action." 14 Again, life is a stream 
which in its evolution continues an initial 
impulsion. 15 

In the interest of clearness we believe that 
definiteness at this point is of exceeding import- 
ance. If life is the intersection of spirit and 
matter, then spirit is really the creator of life, 
spirit is the abiding some-what from which by 
reason of its contact with matter individual 
examples of life repeatedly arise. If, however, 
life is the initial impulsion continued through 
evolution, it must be coincident with if not 
superior to the first stream of reality, which is 
spirit. If by life we mean a push in the sense 
of causal activity, we are forced to ask whether 



12 Creative Evolution, pp. 268f. 

13 Ibid., p. 128. 

14 Ibid., p. 128. 

15 Ibid., p. 246. 

70 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

it belongs to the order of matter or to the order 
of spirit, or derives from some source above 
the two which originated both movements or 
streams. Just as in the illustration of the 
steam and the drops of water Bergson assumed 
the existence of matter as a factor in its own 
genesis, here he assumes life as its own creator. 
Thus his dualism amounts to an impasse be- 
cause he makes both matter and spirit self- 
generative and independent. We have thus 
moved about the circle, but we have explained 
nothing. This destiny must ever follow the 
attempt to get at the source of the material or 
spiritual order by any process of impersonalism. 
We are inevitably committed to the infinite 
regress unless we assume personality as the 
ground of being. 

Life as Duration 

Nor will the unqualified assumption of "pure" 
duration as the definition of life yield us ade- 
quate results. Duration is really the experi- 
ence of succeeding states of consciousness 
before they are gathered into the temporal 
synthesis. Duration is the soul side of per- 
ception (with reference to the element), and 
coincides with memory. "Pure" duration is 
these synthesized and related successions. Just 
because duration gathers into itself these past 
71 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

experiences and brings them to bear upon the 
present moment, introducing purpose and 
uniqueness into the moving stream, Bergson 
defines it as of the essence of life. No fault 
can be found with such a definition except its 
indefiniteness. He is by the term "pure dura- 
tion" implying exactly that which is gathered 
up in the common term "personality," for a 
consciousness of duration, that is, of succession 
in states, is possible only to a unity that abides 
self-consciously above the flux; that gathers the 
successive states into relation to itself; which 
grows by these experiences and yet transcends 
them in its own self -recognition. The only 
concrete example of such synthesizing and self- 
identifying unity which is given us is found in 
persons. If, then, we remove from the idea 
of duration those abstractions due to intellect- 
ualization, we shall find the definition a true 
one and deeper than we dreamed. The truth 
might be stated in plain words that life is, in 
whatever phase we find it, the expression of 
personality. If it be self-conscious, according 
to the manner of our own experience, it is human 
personality; if it be unconscious, speaking after 
our order, it must be an expression, in some form 
which we may not determine, of a creative 
personality. Only thus can we reach that 
indeterminateness, or freedom, which is the 

72 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

promise of Bergson's philosophy, and also avoid 
the meshes of mechanical causation. 

Life as Vital Impulse 
When we come to consider the doctrine of 
initial "vital impulse" to account for the homo- 
geneity of the universe, we shall be equally at 
loss from the impersonal standpoint. We must 
press on and invest this originative impulse 
with purposive powers. A homogeneity result- 
ing from a vital impulse which is a mere push 
acquires its homogeneity from the absolute 
equation of cause and effect, the law of the 
sufficient reason. It matters little what term 
we apply to that original creative impulse, it 
must contain within itself a power sufficient to 
account for that which it has created. It must 
be something more than a blind stumble in the 
dark, which fortuitously set in motion powers 
far beyond its own ken or reckoning. Either 
that homogeneity of which we speak springs 
from an adequate creative purpose (in which 
we seem to wed ourselves to the system of abso- 
lute idealism), or, if no adequate creative 
purpose were present, we are inevitably tied to 
a system of mechanical causation, bound to 
find every effect potentially (which means 
actually) present within its cause. The latter 
conclusion renders evolution impossible, just 
73 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

as the former creates a system of determinism. 
Now, the avowed object of the philosophy of 
change is to avoid this conclusion. A vital 
impulse which was an initial accident, an upset 
of static forces and nothing more, can never, 
to logical minds, give adequate explanation of 
anything but a world of accident and disorder. 
It can never account for a world of order, or of 
personalities, to say nothing of a world of free- 
dom. 

We are beset with parallel difficulties when 
we think of the original impulse as purposive 
and personal, adequate for the creation of a 
world of persons, but moving only through an 
initial impulsion. Here, again, we happen upon 
that world of grim determinism which Berg- 
son has discovered to be the nightmare of 
Absolutism. It appears that just as we resort 
to a personal realism to express for ourselves 
the relation of the individual to his world, 
assuming as our fundamental proposition the 
reality of the person and the reality of his 
correspondences, so if we would keep freedom or 
uniqueness anywhere, we must assume a funda- 
mental Personality to express the relation be- 
tween first cause and the world that springs 
therefrom. Moreover, this relation must be 
not past. It must not be the beginning of a 
long and exhaustless succession, but an ever- 
74 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

present, ever-continuing relationship, without 
which the whole order of matter and spirit, exist- 
ing in time and space, would be nonexistent or 
would pass away. Only thus can we have a 
unity which is other than a tedious and unchang- 
ing identity. The old recourse to potential- 
ities has been exploded times enough, so that 
it is unnecessary to recall it here, but it may 
be well to recall that in a system of mechanical 
causation where the effect is contained in the 
cause we can have no progress at all. This 
fact bears the test of actual experience. No 
progress is made in society, not an invention 
enters in to lift heavy burdens from the backs of 
men, no discovery, no new thought is possible 
according to the law of mechanical causation. 
It is because life in its uniqueness is forever 
trampling under foot this law of effect wholly 
contained in its mechanical or phenomenal 
cause; because it is ever transcending the limits 
laid down in the mechanistic scheme, that there 
remains a hope that in civilization, in arts, in 
knowledge, to-morrow shall be better than to- 
day, or to-day be anything more than parallel 
with all the days that have gone before. 

Thus also we must conclude that the evolution 
of a world of life, with its varying species and 
its growing adaptabilities, is dependent at every 
step upon the entrance of a unique creative 

75 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

energy which acts in its realm after the manner 
of that creative energy which in us binds our 
world to new purposes, new thoughts, and new 
ideals. 

If unity is to mean anything, it must be 
something more than a form of words. Homo- 
geneity in the universe means a continually 
active, living creative power, or else we have 
but the homogeneity of determinism and death. 

Life as the Point of Minimum 
cognition 
Can we, then, agree with the assumption 
that we get closest to life in the moment of 
pure perception, that intuitional moment when, 
as Bergson expresses it, we "put ourselves in 
things"? Yes, and no. Yes, if we give full 
force to that term which Bergson so apparently 
neglects, namely, "ourselves." No, if we mean 
that perception devoid to the greatest degree 
of mental and experiential content gives the 
truest picture of life. If this last assumption 
were true, if truest perception were innocent 
of all intellectualizing; if it were greatest and 
nearest life in the measure of its freedom from 
all relation to past experiences which make up 
our personality, then the only course left the 
true philosopher would be to seek with all his 
powers the Nirvana of minimum cognition. 
76 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

If we are to assume the realistic view of per- 
ception as the act of "putting ourselves into 
things," we ought in all fairness to define the 
meaning we intend to include in the term 
"ourselves." It might be we should thus 
introduce in an apparently innocent term 
assumptions that have an unconsciously pro- 
found bearing on all that follows. We are 
convinced that this is true in the present case. 
We cannot even in the "purest" perception rid 
ourselves of the distinction fundamental to all 
perception, the distinction between the "me" 
and the "not me." Any process which removes 
from perception that rationalizing element which 
the perceiving person inevitably brings with him 
has also removed perception. We cannot have 
perception that possesses any meaning unless 
it bears some relation to an individual. The 
meaning of any particular perception or intui- 
tion is made in considerable part by what the 
individual himself actually is. The only seem- 
ing exception to this would be in the infant 
just born, who is following an intuition for the 
first time, as, for instance, that of food. Even 
here it is clear that a second experience would 
not be a "pure" intuition or perception but a 
following of habit already laid down by previous 
experience. My own feeling is that the first 
act should not be called an act of intuition just 
77 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

because it is devoid of experience, and so of 
mental content. If we were to grant, for pur- 
poses of argument, that the following of this 
first instinct for food is an intuition, we must 
remember that this intuition is already laid 
down according to the laws of the child's being. 
That is to say, the child brings a child nature to 
the act of intuition, and that first act is at some 
distance removed from the intuition of a simple 
cell by reason of the mental machinery attend- 
ant upon it and prepared to act. In other 
words, the intuition is intelligent, filled with 
conclusions of relationship between the indi- 
vidual and his world, though the individual 
himself has not created them nor set them up. 
If intuition or perception were to be "pure" as 
being devoid of all such intelligible meaning, 
it would be nothing at all, perception of nothing 
by nothing. In other words, the process of 
perception is a fundamental and indivisible 
realism, which in concrete cases must be as- 
sumed, and which can be analyzed and divided 
only in abstract thought, in the same manner 
in which we use the term of x n in mathematics. 
When we "put ourselves in things" we must 
remember that the "ourselves" part of the 
equation is quite as important as the "thing." 
If we remove the "ourselves," we have no 
equation left. 

78 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

Nowhere does a realism of the personal type 
become more apparently necessary than at 
this point, that is, in the mysterious relation 
that exists between mind and matter in the act 
of perception. If in this act brain can pass 
over into mind, or soul into body, we have not 
two orders of reality — matter and spirit — but 
one. If brain becomes mind we have, of course, 
materialism. Nor can we gain eventual peace 
by flying to a doctrine of psychic parallelism, 
for that too lands us in an abyss, and an abyss 
of worse choosing, for we have then an irre- 
concilable dualism that vitiates the possibility 
of knowledge. Inasmuch as we must assume 
some mystery somewhere, it is best to assume 
it where it is actually seen to exist, in the actual 
relation between the individual and his world, 
and to assume it in such wise that neither the 
individual nor his world will become unreal. 
We assume, then, that personality is the ulti- 
mate fact, the primal and independent mystery. 
And though it be more or less a temperament 
of mind what one shall choose, it may be worth 
while to ask if this will not be as good a choice 
as that realism which makes all reality only a 
relation (and in this is perilously close to idealism 
without its strength), or that older realism 
which attempted to avoid mystery by doing 
away with spirit. It might be as good a choice 

79 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

as that idealism which banishes matter to the 
ghostly realm of ideas, or that empiricism 
which was satisfied because it had lost all power 
of thought in an Unknowable which was really 
but an infinite regress. It might be found on 
examination that realism of the personal type 
will not yield more difficulties but less in an 
attempt to comprehend the meaning of the 
world. At any rate, if we assume our mystery 
to be hidden in personality we possess a concrete 
fact for analysis and study that may ultimately 
yield more of its secret. This gives us better 
promise of light than that which may be wrung 
from invisible seons, Absolutes or Unknow- 
ables. There is no promise that by them we 
can ever bring our judgments to the concrete 
tests of life and experience. 

That certain rationalizing which man in 
distinction from the animals carries into his 
very intuitions is not only his glory but is the 
secret of his understanding of the world. The 
ignorant man, not having access to much of 
reason, may depend more upon his intuitions 
than does the scholar, and his intuitions may, 
acting more quickly, lead him more safely than 
the scholar's reasoning. We ought, however, 
to remember that in the one case the quickness 
may be due to the fact that the whole life has 
not gone beyond the practical interest of food 
80 



MEMORY AND LIFE 

and self-preservation. Even our intuitional 
man is safest in those intuitions that have been 
affected by long years of habit and many expe- 
riences. It is the experienced guide that I 
choose to pole my canoe down the rapids, not 
the most elemental one, because the experienced 
man faced suddenly by a new situation which 
may mean drowning, will be more likely to act 
wisely than the greenhorn who depends on 
intuition rather than upon experience and 
training. Moreover, in sensing of hidden rocks 
and treacherous currents and those elements 
by which the individual enters into the world 
around him it is evident that experience and 
rationalizing bear a practical power which one 
cannot afford to despise, inasmuch as they 
transcend what either man or animal can do by 
mere intuition. This view is borne out by the 
decreasing death-rate of civilization and the 
thousand ameliorative results of intellectuali- 
zation brought to bear on the simplest and most 
elemental relationships of life. 



81 



CHAPTER III 
INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

The philosophy of change includes under the 
single term "instinct," or "intuition," all the 
general activities of the world which fall under 
the reign of uniformity or law. 1 The term is 

1 "It has been asked how far instinct is conscious. Our 
reply is that there are a vast number of differences and degrees, 
that instinct is more or less conscious in certain cases, uncon- 
scious in others. The plant, as we shall see, has instincts; 
it is not likely that these are accompanied by feeling. Even 
in the animal there is hardly any complex instinct which is not 
unconscious in some part at least of its exercise. But here we 
must point out a difference, not often noticed, between two 
kinds of unconsciousness, namely, that in which consciousness 
is absent and that in which consciousness is nullified. Both are 
equal to zero, but in one case the zero expresses the fact that 
there is nothing, in the other that we have two equal quantities 
of opposite sign which compensate and neutralize each other. 
The unconsciousness of a falling stone is of the former kind: 
the stone has no feeling of its fall. Is it the same with the 
unconsciousness of instinct, in the extreme cases in which 
instinct is unconscious? When we mechanically perform an 
habitual action, when the somnambulist automatically acts 
his dream, unconsciousness may be absolute; but this is 
merely due to the fact that the representation of the act is 
held in check by the performance of the act itself, which 
resembles the idea so perfectly and fits it so exactly that 
consciousness is unable to find room between them. Repre- 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

taken as applying to inanimate and animate 
objects alike. Stones, plants, animals, and 



sentation is stopped up by action. The proof of this is, that if 
the accomplishment of the act is arrested or thwarted by an 
obstacle, consciousness may reappear. It was there but 
neutralized by the action which fulfilled and thereby filled the 
representation. The obstacle creates nothing positive, it 
simply makes a void, removes a stopper. This inadequacy 
of act to representation is precisely what we here call con- 
sciousness. 

"If we examine this point more clearly, we shall find that 
consciousness is the light that plays around the zone of 
possible actions or potential activity which surrounds the 
action really performed by the living being. It signifies 
hesitation or choice. Where many equally possible actions 
are indicated without there being any real action (as in delib- 
eration that has not come to an end), consciousness is intense. 
Where the action performed is the only action possible (as 
in the activity of the somnambulistic or more generally auto- 
matic kind), consciousness is reduced to nothing. 

"Representation and knowledge exist none the less in the 
case if we find a whole series of systematized movements, the 
last of which is already prefigured in the first, and if, besides, 
consciousness can flash out of them at the shock of an obstacle. 
From this point of view the consciousness of a living being may 
be defined as an arithmetical difference between potential and 
real activity. It measures the interval between representation 
and action" (Creative Evolution, pp. 143, 144). 

"Now, in both cases, in the instinct of the animal and in 
the vital properties of the cell, the same knowledge and the 
same ignorance are shown. All goes on as if the cell knew, 
of the other cells, what concerns itself; as if the animal knew, 
of the other animals, what it can utilize — all else remaining in 
shade. It seems as if life as soon as it has become bound up 
in a species is cut off from the rest of its own work, save at 
one or two points that are of vital concern to the species just 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

man are all said to possess instinct. The same 
term covers the action of gravity in a falling 
stone, the affinity of chemical substances, the 
torsion of a plant's tendrils, automatic action 
in animals and man. As is always true in such 
an attempt at generalization, many pitfalls lie 
in the way. We are forced to make distinctions 

arisen. Is it not plain that life goes to work here exactly 
like consciousness, exactly like memory? We trail behind us, 
unawares, the whole of our past; but our memory puts into 
our present only the odd recollection or two that in some 
way complete our present situation. Thus the instinctive 
knowledge which one species possesses of another on a certain 
particular point has its root in the very unity of life, which is, 
to use the expression of an ancient philosopher, 'a whole 
sympathetic to itself.' It is impossible to consider some of 
the special instincts of the animal and of the plant, evidently 
arisen in extraordinary circumstances, without relating them 
to those recollections seemingly forgotten, which spring up 
suddenly under the pressure of an urgent need" (Creative 
Evolution, p. 167). 

"Though the plant is distinguished from the animals by 
fixity and insensibility, movement and consciousness sleep 
in it as recollections which may waken" (Creative Evolution, p. 
119). 

"Even if we could refer the instincts of animals to habits 
intelligently acquired and hereditarily transmitted, it is not 
clear how this sort of explanation could be extended to the 
vegetable world, where effort is never intelligent, even sup- 
posing it is sometimes conscious. And yet, when we see 
with what sureness and precision climbing plants use their 
tendrils, what marvelously combined maneuvers the orchids 
perform to secure their fertilization by means of insects, how 
can we help thinking that these are so many instincts?" 
(Creative Evolution, p. 170.) 

84 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

between the various kinds of instincts, dis- 
tinctions which to many will seem too contrast- 
ing to be included under a single term. Bergson 
distinguishes between the instinct which is 
attended by consciousness and instinct where 
consciousness is absent. Consciousness, he tells 
us, is not present in the instinct of inanimate 
objects. A falling stone has no feeling of its 
fall. Even the animal is at the most only 
partially conscious of its instinct. In man 
instinct is conscious, but the consciousness of 
instinct is nullified when action has become 
wholly automatic, as in bicycle riding or in the 
action of a sleep-walker. Consciousness is 
really the sign of the presence of intelligence 
and signifies hesitation or choice. The instinct 
of plant or animal in matters of vital interest 
wherein it touches some other species seems to 
Bergson to imply recollection of the past, trans- 
mitted from parent to offspring. It might not 
be amiss to call attention in passing to the purely 
verbal and imaginary character of such trans- 
mission. The idea is as figurative as Spencer's 
doctrine of transmitted "race experience." 
But to Bergson it is a reality springing from 
the unity of life. He turns from the idea that 
instinct is laid down in animals by intelligently 
formed habit because that would not enable 
him to account for such examples of instinct 

85 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

as are shown by the tropisms of plants and 
the efforts of the orchids at cross-fertiliza- 
tion. 

It is Necessary to Attain Accuracy in the 
Use of the Term "Intuition" 
We do not intend in these pages to contradict 
the idea that intuition gets closer to life than 
intelligence. What we propose is to show that 
the term "intuition" must be more closely 
defined, and that in using it we must never lose 
sight of the inseparable intellectual elements 
which it contains. That the intuition, at least 
in man, contains inseparable intellectual ele- 
ments is a fact of which Bergson is himself 
quite aware, and which no one familiar with 
Kant's great contribution to thought can over- 
look. It seems to us, however, that the whole 
doctrine of the philosophy of change as it relates 
to theory of thought is weakened by failure to 
make the distinction which Bergson recognizes 
a basic and established part of his system. 
We may seem to acquire a certain unity by the 
use of general terms, but when those general 
terms conceal differences of nature, as well as 
of degree, their seeming unity is a deception. 
This always will be true unless, indeed, we take 
the general term to mean no more than the 
least common denominator. Assuming a least 
86 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

common denominator and then taking the 
highest factor of our highest quantity as if it 
were the least common denominator is a fallacy 
common to philosophy. In mathematics, which 
depend upon the concrete symbol, the fallacy 
is easily detected; in metaphysics or episto- 
mology, where one must use the inaccurate 
symbols of language, one may easily be uncon- 
scious of vitiating fallacies. 

Let us look for a moment at the use which is 
made in the philosophy of change, of the word 
"intuition." We shall find that while it is 
the highest factor of one of the elements of our 
generalization, it is also frequently used as if 
it were the lowest common denominator of 
them all. For example, this term is used to 
describe not only the instinct which is exempli- 
fied in the conscious life and activities of the 
animals, and that higher and unique possession 
of creative and intelligent action of the thinking 
man; it is likewise used of mere cellular attrac- 
tion and the chemical affinity of unconscious life. 
The reaching out of a simple cell toward food 
or light, or its response to chemical change, 
wonderful as those responses of the cell to its 
environment may be, should not be identified 
with the intuition of a thinking being. For 
instance, he says of certain plants: 

When we see with what sureness and precision climbing 
87 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

plants use their tendrils, what marvelously combined 
maneuvers the orchids perform to secure their fertiliza- 
tion by means of insects, how can we help thinking of 
these as so many instincts? 2 

We have a right to inquire here whether by 
instinct he means unconscious automatic reac- 
tion to stimulus. If so, that is one thing; but if 
he means to imply conscious, intelligent, or psy- 
chical effort, that is quite another matter. If 
he does not mean to imply this latter suppo- 
sition, he has chosen an unfortunate "metamor- 
phizing" form of words, and instinct is surely 
not the most appropriate term to use. 

There may be fundamental qualities in the 
cell, or the cell may be so constituted that by 
its nature it reaches after the thing that will 
enter into its structure to build it up. It may 
likewise avoid elements that are destructive, 
but when in this connection we speak of the 
choice of the cell, we are not using that word in 
the sense in which we would use it of a human 
being. We might recall the rejection by mole- 
cules of water of molecules of oil. The refusal 
of the water to amalgamate with oil is not, 
strictly speaking, a matter of choice on the part 
of the water. It is a matter inherent in the na- 
ture of two contrasting elements. I may use the 
word "choice" to express the fact that the two 

2 Cited above, Creative Evolution, p. 170. 
88 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

cannot combine, but it is obvious that in apply- 
ing it I have been using a figure of speech. If I 
lose sight of the fact under cover of the word in 
which I have expressed it and then go on 
"anthropomorphizing" my drop of water, I 
can easily make it account for everything in 
heaven and earth, and there is no limit except 
the limit of my imagination. This is exactly 
what is done times without number by the 
uncritical. We cannot use the term "intuition" 
or "instinct" as applicable in the same sense to 
tropisms in the simplest forms of life, to instinct 
in animals and to intuition in man. The incon- 
sistency is apparent to us if we give the term 
"intuition" its lowest instead of its highest 
possible meaning. If we should make intuition 
consonant merely with cellular attraction, and 
then try to make it the basis of explanation of 
all conscious and intelligent life, we should see 
this. Such a proposition is immediately absurd 
except to the blindest and most thoroughgoing 
materialist who does not believe in purpose, or 
will, or moral responsibility, but only in piti- 
lessly driving forces. Hence, when we use the 
terms "choice," "purpose," "consciousness," 
"perception," and "intuition," we must use 
them with minute discrimination or we must 
suffer the misfortune of being continually misled 
in our conclusions. Cellular affinity may be 

89 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

wholly elemental and mechanical, instinct in 
animals may be an unconscious response to the 
demands of habit and life, but intuition in man 
is a psychological fact. No one should attempt 
to unite the truths and processes of chemistry, 
biology, and psychology under a common term 
which would assume all three to be identical. 

The Intellectual Element in all 
Human Intuition 
Following along the lines already laid down, 
it will be seen that we must not only rec- 
ognize the fact that all human intuition is 
shot through with intelligence, with intellect- 
ualization, but we must use our term as if this, 
and not something else, were the fact. The 
acknowledgment of error or of sin is of no 
practical value if one continues repeating the 
offense. The recognition of the right and the 
true brings no profit to me until I act as if the 
right and the true were a desirable part of action. 
So in philosophy one has not done his full duty 
when he has said "Good morning" to a funda- 
mental principle, if thereafter he proceed to act 
as if that fundamental principle did not hold. 
Consequently, any doctrine of intuition must 
reckon with the fact that intuition in a human 
being is inseparable from intelligence. That 
which the individual brings to the act of intui- 
90 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

tion, though it be no conscious part of the act 
because it is the acting self, is nevertheless 
present, and cannot be eliminated without 
destroying or nullifying the act. There can be 
no human intuition in the strict sense of the 
term without intelligence. 

The dependence of intuition upon intelli- 
gence is thus set forth by Henri Poincare: 

The majority of men do not like thinking, and this is 
perhaps a good thing, since instinct guides them, and very 
often better than reason would guide a pure intelligence, 
at least when they are pursuing an end that is imme- 
diate and always the same. But instinct is routine, and 
if it were not fertilized by thought, it would advance no 
further with man than with the bee and the ant. 3 

The discrepancy becomes further apparent 
when we try to think what intuition would 
mean apart from intelligence. What would 
be the nature of any knowledge of the outside 
world which was not intelligible? Begging the 
indulgence of the reader for mentioning any- 
thing so simple, it would appear that unintel- 
ligible intuition in a human being would possess 
no meaning at all. How the mind could grasp 
knowledge which is other than intelligence, and 
what sort of mental possession it would be when 
grasped, is a deeper mystery than all the sciences 
and philosophies would seem adequate to ex- 

3 Science and Method, pp. 16, 17. 
91 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

plain. The reason would be that in dealing 
with that particular kind of intuition we should 
be beyond the realm of thought and intelligence 
altogether. 

Bergson himself states the fact no less plainly 
when he says, "All concrete instinct is mingled 
with intelligence, as all real intelligence is 
penetrated by instinct." 4 

The difficulty here lies in the conclusion. 
It is one thing to announce that the two means 
of knowledge, instinct and intelligence, can 
never be separated; it is quite another thing to 
draw conclusions which are dependent upon 
their contrast and isolation, as, for instance, 
that their isolation has led to the contrasting 
evolution of man, the animals and the plants, 
and that one (intelligence) is inferior to the other 
in all vital or practical matters. A careful 
examination will impress the reader with the 
fact that instinct in the philosophy of change 
does service by reason of its identity with intel- 
ligence. But while we may make intelligence 
the inseparable companion of instinct, we pro- 
ceed with rashness when we ascribe intelligence 
to the so-called instinct of plants. 

The discussion has, we believe, been suffi- 
ciently extended to show that instinct in plants, 
and even in animals, possesses a different content 

* Creative Evolution, p. 137. 
92 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

from instinct in man. This separating gulf 
cannot be spanned with a word without giving 
it two distinct meanings. So far as we can 
know, instinct in man is inseparable from 
intelligence, while so far as the plants are con- 
cerned, if they have instinct, it cannot be 
attended by intelligence in them. The only 
intelligence which could be posited would lie 
outside the plant. It is not instinct which 
leads the blackberry to cross-breed with the 
raspberry to produce the loganberry, but the 
external determining intelligence of a Burbank. 
What passes for instinct in plants might be the 
sign of a supreme directing Intelligence, but 
such a suggestion will be a scandal to many 
philosophers. 

Intuition as a Practical Guide in 

Life 

Like considerations will appear as necessary 

limitations to the theory that intuition unaided 

by intelligence is a sure or a superior guide in 

the practical affairs of life. 

We are told that "Intuition ... is a lamp 
almost extinguished, which only glimmers now 
and then, for a few moments at most. But it 
glimmers wherever a vital interest is at stake. 
On our personality, on our liberty, on the place 
we occupy in the whole of nature, on our origin 
93 



BERGSQN AND PERSONAL REALISM 

and perhaps also on our destiny, it throws a 
light feeble and vacillating but which none the 
less pierces the darkness of the night in which 
the intellect leaves us." 5 

The cases of intuition which are cited in the 
Creative Evolution 6 while much disputed seem 
on reflection to display an ineptness for fur- 
thering the claim of superiority of intuition 
over intelligence. The action of the Sitaris 
and of the Sphex, as a recent writer has pointed 
out 7 , is wonderful only as the highest reach of 
unreasoning instinct. Considered as the best 
that might be done by a surgeon, the bungling 
and ofttimes unsuccessful attempt to paralyze 
the nerves of its victim by the Sphex would be 
a poor performance indeed. Wonder is created 
not that instinct is a surer guide than intelli- 
gence, but that in such matters it is any guide 
at all. When we come to a knowledge of vital 
action in other forms of life, it is not intuition 
which tells us the most, but hard, patient, and 
scientific analysis. We have, then, to admit 
that the rendering of the verdict for intuition 
as a superior guide where matters of vital 



* Creative Evolution, pp. 267, 268. 

6 Ibid., pp. 146, 147; p. 172. 

7 McKellar Stewart, A Critical Exposition of Bergson's 
Philosophy, pp. 181, 182. 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

interest were at stake calls for further exami- 
nation. 

The moth, following the instinct of habit, 
flies directly into the flame of the candle and 
perishes. Here it must be admitted there is 
"a vital interest at stake," and we also think 
that power to reason would have been a valu- 
able asset in arriving at the nature of things. 
In fact, lack of intelligence will in this case be 
seen to limit rather than increase the surviving 
powers. Instinct may prove very good for a 
static world of routine and habit, but certainly 
will be found a poor substitute for intelligence 
in a world of change. Intelligence has an 
adaptability to new forms of environment upon 
which instinct breaks the individual as ruth- 
lessly as rocks dash to foam the waves of the sea. 
The animal world shows a lack of adaptability 
under new conditions, such as an unseasonable 
snowstorm, the coming of unaccustomed con- 
ditions of cold or heat, which is characterized 
chiefly by its helplessness. If the condition be 
unusual and suddenly brought on, animals 
perish hopelessly in sight of shelter. The sheep 
in the storm knows the habitual refuge of the 
nightly fold, but his instinct does not lead him 
to find an unaccustomed refuge. The power 
of adaptability in instinct is very, very small, 
and largely dependent upon habit. 
95 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Mr. Bergson seems to have this deeper inter- 
pretation of instinct in mind when he says; 
"It is to the very inwardness of life that intui- 
tion leads us — by intuition I mean instinct that 
has become disinterested, self-conscious, capa- 
ble of reflecting on its object and of enlarging 
upon it indefinitely." 8 But it is necessary only to 
call attention to the fact that instinct which has 
become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of 
reflection, and of indefinite enlargement of its 
knowledge is exactly intuition as Mr. Bergson 
primarily defines it, with this addition, that it 
is infilled with intelligence. This, as we have 
pointed out, is the fundamental condition of 
the appearance of intuition in a human being. 
The only critical difference that we can see 
between this definition of intuition and the 
definition of intelligence is that the one is knowl- 
edge in the moment of action and the other is 
knowledge in the moment of reflection. 

Implications of Such a Doctrine as to 
the Nature of Truth 

It is important that we should in any such 
doctrine of intuition consider its implication 
regarding the nature of truth. Apparently, if 
intelligence cannot give us a true report of real- 
ity, and intuition can, truth must be intuitional 

8 Creative Evolution, p. 176. 
96 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

rather than conceptual or rational. Now, if 
we mean by this that pragmatic nature which 
implies that truth must ever be brought from 
the realm of reflection to the realm of action, 
it will be easy to concede the point. Such an 
assumption will not raise further difficulties. 
But if we mean to vitiate the reality and force 
of those general conceptions which bear a scien- 
tific, a logical, or a moral mandate, for all time, 
we pay too great a price. 

We must not ignore the fact of general truths 
in the realm of morals which spring out of the 
very nature of man as a moral being, and which 
will be binding and real so long as man and 
society remain what they are. In a like manner 
there are logical truths which are innate in the 
mental constitution of man, whose force and 
reality not only cannot be denied but contrary 
to which one cannot go and gain credence 
among men. In the physical world there are 
courses of action, relations between things, 
that exist in their very nature, which are true 
forever in a world as at present constituted. 
These uniformities have an inexorableness and 
a finality utterly disregardful of individual 
preferences, and we call them laws. Why, 
when we bring the experience of the passing 
moment into relation with these wider realities, 
we should consider ourselves getting away from 
97 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

reality is hard for some of us to see. Unless 
those rationalizations or intellectualizations do 
give us some knowledge of reality, no credible 
science is possible. We ought, therefore, if 
we are to hold a distinction between intuition 
and intelligence, to recognize the inseparable 
factors in the case, and to move forward to a 
ground that would not invalidate the one at 
the expense of the other. 

On the basis taken in the philosophy of 
change it seems difficult for intuition to enter 
the field of knowledge at all, for knowledge 
that cannot be mentally grasped, knowledge 
that cannot be thought, scarcely deserves the 
name. The modern teacher even assumes that 
the pupil does not really know, until he is able 
to express that which he knows. 

Unless we can establish some general ground 
on which truth can have a common validity 
for all normal minds, we fall into a fatal solip- 
sism which haunts us at every step of the way. 
The perception of the moment being the only 
glimpse of reality, the past becomes but a 
shadow of the real, in spite of the theory of 
duration put forward to sustain it. Only 
that will be strictly true which I am experienc- 
ing at the present moment, and it will be true 
only for me. I have nothing to bind the fleeting 
experiences of my own life into the unity of 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

reality. And, if change itself is the real, there 
is no certainty whatever that any truth of to- 
day will be true to-morrow, nor that any reality 
is more than the passing phantasm of an indi- 
vidual experience. The weakness in such a 
standpoint lies in its inability to pass from the 
validity of individual experience to the validity 
of the common- to-all. Even this consideration 
will prove insufficient for any system which does 
not assume a back-lying Creative Intelligence 
according to which all things move in a world 
of reality, and which makes this reality true 
and binding upon all the members of the system. 

The Theory of Intuition as an Aid 
to Religious Ideas 

Because the philosophy of change has seemed 
to lend itself in an unusual way to the support 
of familiar religious ideas, and because an 
uncritical acceptance of such support may be 
attended by disastrous consequences, it is desir- 
able that we should consider the possible bear- 
ing of the doctrine of intuition upon religious 
problems. 

At first glance one is quite likely to jump to 
the conclusion that here is an easy solution of 
the difficulties that surround the problem of 
revelation. If intuition is in closest touch with 
reality, it appears quite foolish to waste much 
99 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

time in intellectualizing, as that is sure to land 
one in the ditch of unreality. One needs only 
to listen to the "inner voice." Hence it becomes 
easy to account for those strange abnormalities 
of genius, the Shakespeares, the Beethovens, 
and others, who from no adequate foundation 
either of birth or of culture became the world's 
prophets and seers, writing literature and har- 
monies which transcend the accomplishments 
of their own age and are eternally commanding. 
The idea is most fascinating, one must admit, 
and thoroughly in keeping with the prevailing 
realism and romanticism of the age. Espe- 
cially does it seem to commend itself to the 
explanation of religious genius, springing at 
times in ignorant unlettered men. Before we 
give complete place to our impulse we ought, 
however, to ask after the meaning and tests of 
inspiration and revelation. 

What is the test of revelation? Is it declared 
by the abnormality of its appearance? It is 
often so conceived. Abnormality is to some 
the very mark of revelation. Is the strange 
and inexplicable character of its coming a part 
of the proof of its genuineness and of its inspi- 
ration? It is certain that if in the end we 
depend upon such tests, anything inexplicable, 
claiming to be revelation, must be accepted, 
and we are forced to inherit a great brood of 
100 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

superstitions. Unless the test of revelation is 
in the end a moral one it will follow that reve- 
lation has no moral or spiritual value. In such 
a case nothing can save us from theological 
shipwreck. We must, then, in order to give 
moral validity to revelation, judge it, not by 
its appearance in the unlettered, nor by its 
intuitional character, but by its ability to stand 
the concrete tests of experience and life. Reve- 
lation is disclosed not by any fortuitous circum- 
stances in which it comes clothed, nor by the 
claims it advances for itself, but, rather, in its 
power to make men better, to enlarge the 
spiritual and moral horizons, to exalt the stand- 
ards and ideals of actual life, and to make a 
universal appeal to the moral and spiritual 
nature of man everywhere. 

The theory of the superiority of intuition to 
grasp the realities of religion moves upon the 
assumption that it is easier for God to reveal 
himself through the impulses than through 
the intelligence. Entirely aside from the dis- 
credit which such a theory throws upon a crea- 
tive Wisdom which is as responsible for mental 
as for intuitional powers, such a condition of 
things does not appear in the ordinary phases 
of life. The great prophets and spiritual leaders 
of the world have not been in any case notably 
ignorant. Sometimes untrained in the for- 
101 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

malities of the schools they have been, but with 
a keenness of intellectual grasp which has gone 
to the fundamentals of the problems with which 
they have dealt. And this fact too is a reason- 
able one, because the lower and wider appeal 
must fail if it is out of line with man's intel- 
ligence. 

Intuition and intelligence are not, then, to be 
separated in normal personalities. Intuition 
without intelligence is no more than the mean- 
ingless or equivocal raging of the sibyl. Intel- 
ligence without some measure of intuition is 
impossible. 

Neither should we unthinkingly assume that 
the philosophy of change by its denial of purpose 
makes way for the acceptance of the miracu- 
lous without an act of faith. The apparent 
freedom of the philosophy of change is won 
not only by the negation of determinism, but 
while it is expelling the demon of materialism 
it is allowed to banish also an angel of light by 
the further negation of purposive determination. 
In this scheme, in which change is original, the 
fundamentally real, if there were to be a God 
at all, he could neither know nor determine 
what would happen the next minute, being 
himself as blind and helpless as the blinding 
storm of atoms which he also is. This being 
the case, it occurs to us to ask what would be the 
102 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

value of a purposeless miracle if we had one? 
It would obviously possess no value. If a 
miracle does not indicate a divine purpose; if it 
is simply the blind drive of an unrestrained, 
undirected freedom, it is no miracle but only an 
accident. Once allow miracle to be true to 
its nature as an evidence of Divine Personal 
direction, and you erect that very determinism 
which it is Bergson's purpose to avoid. 

What bearing might the doctrine of intuition 
as closest to reality have upon the question of 
the essence of religion? Are not the intuitive 
feelings in religion the safest to follow? Is it 
not true that intellectualism is the bane of reli- 
gion, and has there not existed between them 
the distrust of long ages? It is certain that 
much of popular feeling is in strict accord with 
this idea. Intellectualism has many times been 
set forth as the foe of religion. Do not such 
popular convictions usually find a basis in psy- 
chological reality? We cannot approach the 
solution of this problem directly, but here 
again we must begin by laying down a propo- 
sition and asking a question. If intuition gets 
closest to reality in religion, then the more 
intuitional religion becomes, the purer and 
truer it should be. How does this proposition 
test out in life? The most intuitive religions 
we have are those of savage tribes. In utter 
103 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

and unreflecting devotion to religious intui- 
tions they cannot be surpassed. Are they not 
the most religious of all people? It is not 
necessary to answer the question. The reason 
the savage is not the most religious man is 
because religion runs deepest, strikes longest 
roots into reality, when it adds intelligence to 
intuition. No ignorant and unconsidering cre- 
dulity can ever represent the highest type of 
religion. High intelligence linked with faith, 
intuition tested by reason and life — this repre- 
sents the best that we know. The highest 
type of saint is also the highest type of man. 

In What Sense can Intuition be Said 
to Bring Us Nearer Reality? 

Attention already has been called to the fact 
that however simple may have been the defi- 
nition of intuition when it is convenient to use 
that term of plants and animals, when we come 
to apply it to man we bring into it an altogether 
new content, the element of intellectual judg- 
ment which is inseparable from the human per- 
sonality. If, now, we will proceed on this 
understanding and assume that intuition is the 
personality in action, while intelligence is the 
personality in the act of reflection, we shall 
come upon what I deem the deep truth and 
purpose of Bergson's doctrine. Intuition does 
104 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

partake of this inseparable intellectual element, 
but frequent repetition of an act serves to put 
the intellectual element in the background and 
to make the action as we say instinctive and 
automatic. The place for intellectualization in 
riding a bicycle is when one is first learning. 
Soon the movements become automatic and 
unconscious so that without anxious thought 
one meets the various crises of riding. This is 
the kind of intuition which can be truly said 
to be nearest life, for it is at the point where the 
personality does lay closest hold on the external 
world. It comes, however, not before but 
after intellect has done its work, and reason 
and choice have settled into unconscious habit. 
Let us consider the bearing of this truth in the 
realm of religious ideas. Here, as elsewhere, 
action has not come to represent the most inti- 
mate life until it has passed out of the region of 
willed action into that of instinctive action. 
Just as the artist has not become really creative 
until the manipulation of brush and color has 
become unconscious, and as the musician cannot 
really enter into the expression of music so long 
as he must think about the manipulation of 
the keys of his instrument, so there is a sense 
in which religion becomes the deepest expression 
of character only when by long habit and many 
repetitions the moral and religious action has 
105 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

become instinctive. But it must ever be 
remembered that this does not take place, these 
habits are not laid down without effort or 
thought in the beginning. Moral intuitions 
depend on formed habits, training, and dis- 
cipline, and our consciences are far more under 
the mastery of the usual way of looking at 
things, the things that we have been taught, 
than we would ordinarily be willing to admit. 
In religious living what one does with effort 
counts, but those courses of action that have so 
written themselves into life that one does the 
good unconsciously, indicate far more than the 
occasional action the moving forces of life. 
It is equally possible for the individual to school 
himself in irreligion and evil so that his instinc- 
tive action becomes evil. This existence of good 
and bad motives arises from the struggle of 
elements that have been given place in the per- 
sonality by free choices, will, and action. Do 
these contrasting intuitions spring in common 
from the "vital elan/' or from the Divine Per- 
sonality? They are, rather, the condition 
under which voluntary goodness or character 
can be attained, and they go no farther back 
than the choosing individual. The individual 
must come to that point of choosing the good 
which characterizes the Eternal Goodness, and 
this victory can be won only when habitual 
106 



INTUITION AND INTELLIGENCE 

willing has made goodness and righteousness 
intuitive and unconscious. 

Some one may take issue with this view of the 
origin of evil. If so, it is a comfort to remember 
that the origin of evil is not so important a 
matter as its presence. The origin of evil may 
be an interesting ethical problem, but the prac- 
tical problem is concerned with the presence 
of evil in our world and the steps that may be 
taken for its banishment. It is not necessary 
to load the presence of evil upon the Divine 
Being or to make him responsible for its exist- 
ence. The assumption that evil came into the 
world as some independent absolute entity is 
quite unnecessary. The possibility of evil 
lies in the nature of free will in process of devel- 
opment. The future of evil is determined not 
by the Divine Being but by the moral agents 
he has created for this task. It has no external 
permanence apart from the willing of individuals 
and will disappear from the universal scheme as 
soon as all moral beings come to an intuitional 
or rational obedience to the divine will. It is 
our task as moral beings to banish evil from 
our own hearts, and also, in so far as we can, 
from our world. 



107 



CHAPTER IV 
THE THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

Bergson holds to the homogeneity of space 1 
because thereby he feels able to harmonize the 

1 "Suppose that homogeneous space concerns our action 
and only our action, being like an infinitely fine network 
which we stretch beneath material continuity in order to 
make ourselves masters of it, to decompose it according to 
the plan of our activities and our needs. Then not only has 
our hypothesis the advantage of bringing us into harmony 
with science, which shows us each thing exercising an influ- 
ence on all the others and consequently occupying, in a certain 
sense, the whole of the extended. . . . Not only has it the 
advantage, in metaphysic, of suppressing or lessening the 
contradictions raised by divisibility in space, contradictions 
which always arise, as we have shown, from our failure to 
dissociate the two points of view, that of action from that of 
knowledge. It has, above all, the advantage of overthrowing 
the insurmountable barriers raised by realism between the 
extended world and our perception of it. For, whereas this 
doctrine assumes on the one hand an external reality which is 
multiplied and divided, and on the other sensations alien from 
extensity and without possible contact with it, we find that 
concrete extensity is not divided any more than immediate 
perception is in truth unextended. Starting from realism we 
come back to the point to which idealism had led us; we 
replace perception in things. And we see realism and idealism 
ready to come to an understanding when we set aside the 
postulate, uncritically accepted by both, which served them 
as a common frontier" (Matter and Memory, pp. 308, 309). 
108 



THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

conflict raised by science against idealism. 
Space being homogeneous, anything may be 
assumed to occupy, so far as its influence goes, 
the whole of the extended world a,nd our per- 
ception of it. When this boundary is set 
aside realism and idealism are prepared to come 
together. 

Space, he declares, is that which enables us 
to distinguish identical and simultaneous sen- 
sations from one another. 2 Space, being homo- 
geneous, discretion is had by a process of unfold- 
ing in space, so there is in space neither dura- 
tion nor succession. Experiences which reach 
us under the form of time are distinguished 
from each other by setting them out one by 
one under the form of space. Thus space 
becomes identical with homogeneous time or 
time may be called a bastard form of space. 3 

2 "Space is what enables us to distinguish a number of 
identical and simultaneous sensations from one another; it 
is thus a principle of differentiation other than that of quali- 
tative differentiation, and consequently it is a reality with 
no quality" (Time and Free Will, p. 95). 

3 "Space alone is homogeneous, that objects in space form 
a discreet multiplicity is got by a process of unfolding in space. 
It also follows that there is neither duration nor even suc- 
cession in space, if we give to these words the meaning in 
which the consciousness takes them: each of the so-called 
successive states exists alone; their multiplicity is real only 
for a consciousness that can first retain them and then set 
them side by side by externalizing them in relation to one 

109 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

In this scheme perception and matter tend to 
become identical 4 as we divest ourselves of the 
prejudices of action. Thus Bergson hopes to 
solve the ancient difficulties that hover over the 
definitions of time and space. 

Space as a Qualityless, Homogeneous 
Medium 

With the term "homogeneous," which, in the 
philosophy of change, is applied to space, and by 
means of which the transition is made to time, 
there is sure to be objection because a quality- 
less, homogeneous space could have no "here" 

another. If it retains them, it is because these distinct states of 
the external world give rise to states of consciousness which 
permeate one another, imperceptibly organize themselves 
into a whole, and bind the past to the present by this very 
process of connection. If it externalizes them in relation to 
one another, the reason is, that thinking of their radical 
distinctness (the one having ceased to be when the other 
arrives on the scene), it perceives them under the form of a 
discreet multiplicity, which amounts to setting them out in 
line, in the space in which each of them existed separately. 
The space employed for this purpose is just that which is 
called homogeneous time" (Time and Free Will, p. 121). 

4 "These two terms, 'perception' and 'matter,' approach 
each other in the measure that we divest ourselves of what 
may be called the prejudices of action: sensation recovers 
extensity, the concrete extended recovers its natural conti- 
nuity and indivisibility, and homogeneous space, which 
stood between the two terms like an insurmountable barrier, 
is then seen to have no other reality than that of a diagram 
or a symbol" (Matter and Memory, p. 293). 

110 



THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

nor "there," no independent existence; in fact, 
no existence apart from individual perception. 
A study of this attempt to avoid the pitfalls 
of the realism which, on the one hand, erects 
space into an independent reality, and the 
idealism which on the other would make it 
wholly subjective, reveals the fact that what 
Bergson arrives at is really the existence of 
space and time as means by which the per- 
ceiving subject relates simultaneously existing 
things and successive events to himself. This 
fundamentally correct attitude regarding the 
nature of space furnishes the ground of recon- 
ciliation in the long dispute between realism 
and idealism. To make it effective it needs to 
be safeguarded by further affirmations. It will 
never do to make space or time the possession of 
the individual alone. Some basis must be laid 
for a common order of time. Space is not 
sufficiently removed from the realm of abstract 
ideas by affirming that it exists only in the 
concrete act of perception. Even having come 
thus far from the absolutist conception of space, 
we should have space as a solipsistic experience, 
whereas it possesses much the same content 
and reality for all of us. My space is practically 
your space, and the miles that stretch between 
friends have a similarity for both that is not 
altogether made by their desire to be together 
111 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

but has a validity for all men as well as for them. 
In order to reach this common validity and to 
escape the realm of subjectivism, we must 
assume that space as well as time has some 
meaning for the creative power behind all. 
And, because they are a portion of the mental 
equipment of man they are as much a part of 
reality as any other of his possessions. Space 
has a reality for animals, and even for plants, 
though neither are conscious of it. 

The Idea of Time as a Foem of Space 
Such an assumption in regard to the nature 
of space would make unnecessary the definition 
of time as "bastard space," and would save 
considerable confusion, as we do not in our 
thought ordinarily identify the relating of the 
two systems to ourselves, the one of things 
which may be simultaneous, the other of events 
which are successive. Bergson's idea seems to 
be that successions of events which do not 
enter into individual experience and thus 
become a part of "pure" memory exist only in 
a time whose homogeneity is in nowise distinct 
from the homogeneity of space. The one 
instance in which time is not homogeneous is 
when we consider it under the form of duration. 
Duration is just the successive experiences 
which have made the individual experience, 
112 



THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

and which the individual in time-transcending 
way always brings to bear upon the present 
moment of experience. Time flown is homo- 
geneous with space, but not time flowing. 5 
Thus Bergson lays a foundation for freedom. 
This time-experience that he knows first hand 
is a part of him, is his life, and so, strictly speak- 
ing, is duration. That other time-experience 
by which he thinks over the events of his own 
past, reflecting, rationalizing, and relating them 
to each other and to the present self, that 
process by which he relates the events of history 
to his present situation in the world of time, 
is a purely conceptual quality which we must 
call homogeneous. We set the events of history 
or of past life out in their order as a succession 
of relations. This act we believe Mr. Bergson 
would say is in no way different from the act by 
which we posit things as existing in relation to 
each other in homogeneous space. Outside of 
the concrete act of individual experience, time 
is but a bastard space, a device for dividing, 
classifying, and relating events. This view, 
which would be obnoxious to some because of 
its divergence from the popular view of common 
sense, is chargeable with a real difficulty. I do 
not think of space between yesterday and to- 
day in th e same sense as that which I use in 

6 Time and Free Will, p. 221; also ibid., pp. vii-viii. 
113 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

thinking of the distance that separates me from 
my home. This distinction is a fundamental 
one for thought and cannot be overcome. In 
spite of any attempt to evade the issue, time 
is the form under which one relates events to 
himself. Realism notwithstanding, the two 
orders are not absolutely coincident and never 
can be. This fact compels the philosophy of 
change to attempt its salvation by a doctrine 
of duration. 

In speaking of the child's acquirement of 
mathematics by passing from the pictured 
balls in his arithmetic to abstract number, 
Bergson says: 

As soon as we wish to picture number to ourselves, 
and not merely figures or words, we are compelled to have 
recourse to an extended image. What leads to misunder- 
standing on this point seems to be the habit we have 
fallen into of counting in time rather than in space. In 
order to imagine the number 50, for example, we repeat 
all the numbers starting from unity, and when we have 
arrived at the fiftieth, we believe we have built up the 
number in duration and in duration only. And there is 
no doubt that in this way we have counted moments in 
duration rather than points in space; but the question is 
whether we have not counted the moments of duration 
by means of points in space. It is certainly possible to 
perceive in time, and in time only, a succession which is 
nothing but a succession, but not an addition, i. e., a 
succession which culminates in a sum. For though we 
reach a sum by taking into account a succession of different 
114 



THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

terms, yet it is necessary that each of these terms should 
remain when we pass to the following, and should wait, 
so to speak, to be added to the others: how could it wait 
if it were nothing but an instant of duration? And where 
could it wait if we did not localize it in space? We invol- 
untarily fix at a point in space each of the moments which 
we count, and it is only on this condition that the abstract 
units come to form a sum. 6 

If we reflect on these words, two things will 
become apparent. First, we shall see, relative 
to the thinking of number, that it is a law of 
the mind that it cannot think of the existence 
of objective things without thinking of them in 
spatial relations. Second, it appears to make 
a difference whether I am thinking in the 
general terms of abstract number or of specific 
objects. It makes a difference whether my 
"fifty" is a mathematical symbol representing 
fifty units, or whether I am thinking of fifty 
sheep, for instance. In the latter case I must 
spatialize; in the former case there is nothing 
to spatialize, I only enumerate. This contra- 
diction springs from a question which appears 
in the quotation last cited, when, after affirming 
that the terms of enumeration must wait about 
until the enumeration is finished, he asks, 
"Where could it wait if we did not localize it 
in space?" The assumption would seem to be 



6 Time and Free Will, pp. 78, 79. 
115 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

that ideas need to have space in which to wait 
around, whereas it is merely a question of how 
much the mind is able to grasp at the same 
time. The real reason for the appearance of 
illustrations in the child's arithmetic is to 
teach him the difficult art of abstraction, that 
is, to pass from the concrete instances to the 
symbol under which a thousand diverse things 
may be generalized. 

Why should we be compelled to assume 
spatiality as necessary to abstract number? 
Is not such assumption due to the fact that 
for a moment I have forgotten what is the 
nature of space? Is not spatiality the assign- 
ment of concrete things to their true relation- 
ship of distance from each other and from my- 
self? One does not think of the units of an 
abstract number in terms of space so much 
as in terms of distinctness, of individuality. 
In this sense one's own thoughts might be 
numbered, not by distance but by distinctness. 
It is their distinctness and independence of 
each other that enables me to number them. 
The idea of infinite divisibility, even, is limited 
in its application by the idea of essential unity. 
A horse cut into a thousand pieces does not 
become thereby a thousand horses but only a 
thousand pieces of horse flesh. That I can 
think of a thousand shreds of horse flesh does 
116 



THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

not imply a space to put them in, but that there 
is a law of the mind by which I cannot think 
of separate units as identical, or as occupying 
identical space at the same time. In other 
words, I cannot think in contradictory terms. 

Time as Contracted Experience 
In addition to the thought of time as a sort 
of "bastard" space, the philosophy of change 
sets forward a theory of time as contracted 
experience. 

Would not the whole of history be contained in a very- 
short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension 
than our own, which should watch the development of 
humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great 
phases of its evolution? In short, then, to perceive 
consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely 
diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments 
of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long 
history. 7 

This brilliant idea is introduced as the sequel 
to a consideration of the movements of the 
slowest rays of light, the vibrations of which 
for one second would require at the highest 
point at which the human being is conscious of 
vibration, twenty-five thousand years to count. 
Thus, to a being with a higher rate of percep- 
tion, time would slip away into infinitesimal 
reaches beyond our comprehension. As form- 

7 Matter and Memory, p. 275. 
117 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

ing an illustration of what might be the meaning 
to a Divine Mind of time, which to us would 
have the meaning of infinity because of our 
limited human comprehension, the suggestion 
is startling and fascinating. Applied to finite 
and human conditions it has no such wings 
with which to fly, but is set about by mysteries 
and difficulties. Time viewed as contracted 
experience would vary for different individuals 
according to the intensity of their lives. Of 
course there is a sense in which the measure of 
time is arbitrary and artificial. The moments 
of intense mental occupation leave one with no 
sense of time flown, so that one is surprised at 
the story which the clock records. Moments 
spent in the communion of friendship and of 
joy seem not to need the arbitrary strokes of 
the bell to measure them. Hours sometimes 
concentrate in power and meaning more than 
years. Periods of difficulty, labor, anguish and 
waiting, though short by the clock, drag out to a 
seeming eternity. But these are the exceptional 
moments of life when time seems to fluctuate, 
either because our minds are removed from a 
consideration of its passage or in unusual meas- 
ure bent upon it. In the end we have to adapt 
ourselves to the clock, and only by thus adapting 
ourselves can we manage to get along in a world 
of men. Moreover, these clock hours, in spite of 
118 



THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

any mental preoccupation whatever, write their 
inevitable trail across both bodies and minds. 
The hours of life may be so intense that our 
three score years and ten seem as a day to that 
consciousness of time through which some 
unfortunate, invalided, or suffering brother 
creeps from the cradle to the grave. But that 
fact does not extend the hours of human life. 
His days and ours are eventually measured by 
the clock. It is evident, then, that there is a 
common element of validity in our idea of time, 
which is not accounted for by explaining it as 
contracted experience. Time, with all its arbi- 
trariness and in spite of seeming caprice, has 
been written into the nature of mundane things. 
However it might be with an Infinite Being, it 
surely needs some further definition when we 
speak of it as applied to the finite individual. 
Here too it might be that a creative power 
which is itself above time has been willing to 
set a period to human sorrows and labors. It 
must be something better than the average of 
our human weakness. It is a law of our thought 
but it is also fundamental to the constitution 
of things as we are able to know them. It is 
not merely subjective but has within it a reality 
that permeates our world with a common 
validity. 

The question remains as to which is the 
119 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

important matter here, time, its contraction, 
the experience of time, or the contractor of 
time. 8 Bergson argues that time is realized 
only by holding two points, the "before" and 
the "after," simultaneously, and thus that the 
injection of the space idea is artificial and unreal. 
How, then, would this be in actually consider- 
ing space? Because I think of two points, one 
where I am and the other a thousand miles 
away, do I behold them simultaneously? Is it 
not, rather, a matter of relativity in both cases? 
I apprehend the extent of years by the expe- 
riences intervening. Some experiences are more 
remote than others, and this interval is what I 
think of in affirming lapse of time, just as my 
thought of space is a relating of objects to each 
other or to myself. In what true sense may 
experiences be said to coexist? While one is 
now being experienced, another is known only 
through memory as having existed. They 
certainly exist nowhere outside of personal 
consciousness either human or infinite. 

Time as Duration 

Thus are we brought to a consideration of 

Bergson's doctrine of duration. He touches 

upon the real difficulty when he tells us that 

it is difficult to think of duration in its original 

8 Matter and Memory, p. 281. 

no 



THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

purity because duration applies not only to 
ourselves but to things. 9 Yet duration in 
things and in consciousness, seeming to be 
homogeneous and measurable, is not. Time, 
he says, is a relative matter 10 coinciding with 



9 "We find it extraordinarily difficult to think of duration 
in its original purity; this is due, no doubt, to the fact that we 
do not endure alone; external objects, it seems, endure as we 
do, and time regarded from this point of view has every 
appearance of a homogeneous medium. Not only do the 
moments of this duration seem to be external to one another, 
like bodies in space, but the movement perceived by our 
senses is the, so to speak, palpable sign of a homogeneous 
and measurable duration. Nay, more — time enters into the 
formulae of mechanics, into the calculations of the astronomer, 
and even of the physicist, under the form of a quantity. . . . 
Granted that inner duration, perceived by consciousness, is 
nothing else but the melting of states of consciousness into 
one another, and the gradual growth of the ego, it will be said, 
notwithstanding, that the time which the astronomer intro- 
duces into his formulae, the time which our clocks divide into 
equal portions — this time, at least, is something different: 
it must be a measurable and therefore a homogeneous mag- 
nitude. It is nothing of the sort, however, and a close exam- 
ination will dispel the illusion" (Time and Free Will, p. 107). 

10 "Succession is an undeniable fact, even in the material 
world. Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply 
that their history, past, present, and future, might be instan- 
taneously unfurled like a fan, this history, in point of fact, 
unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our 
own. If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, 
willy-nilly, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is 
big with meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not 
that mathematical time which would apply equally well to 
the entire history of the material world, even if that history 

121 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

my impatience while I wait for the sugar to 
melt in my glass. Time is a completion of the 
uncompleted. 

Over the body there is an arbitrary time 
with which the soul does not reckon. 11 "Wher- 
ever anything lives, there is open somewhere a 
register in which time is being inscribed." 

The inorganic world, on the other hand, he 
concludes, is incapable of duration. It is some- 
thing which dies and is reborn at every instant; 



were spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with 
my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my 
own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. 
It is no longer something thought, it is something lived. It is 
no longer a relation, it is an absolute. . . . The universa 
endures. The more we study the nature of time, the more we 
shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation 
of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new" 
(Creative Evolution, pp. 9-11). 

11 "Like the universe as a whole, like each conscious being 
taken separately, the organism which lives is a thing that 
endures. Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged into its present 
and abides there actual and acting. How otherwise could 
we understand that it passes through distinct and well-marked 
phases, that it changes its age — in short, that it has a history? 
If I consider my body in particular, I find that, like my 
consciousness, it matures little by little from infancy to old 
age; like myself, it grows old. Indeed, maturity and old age 
are, properly speaking, attributes only of my body; it is only 
metaphysically that I apply the same names to the corre- 
sponding changes of my conscious self. . . . Wherever anything 
lives, there is open somewhere a register in which time is be-> 
ing inscribed" (Creative Evolution, pp. 15, 16). 

m 



THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

but all life, like conscious activity, shares in 
duration. 12 

When duration is looked upon as a succession 
of states in consciousness it may be termed 
"pure" duration. 13 Duration may also be re- 
garded from the standpoint of succession in 
phenomena. 14 This distinction enables us to 

12 "In short, the world that the mathematician deals with is 
a world that dies and is reborn at every instant — the world 
which Descartes was thinking of when he spoke of continued 
creation. But in time thus conceived, how could evolution, 
which is the very essence of life, ever take place? Evolution 
implies a real existence of the past in the present, a duration 
which is, as it were, a hyphen, a connecting link. In other 
words, to know a living being or natural system is to get at 
the very interval of duration. . . . 

"Continuity of change, preservation of the past in the 
present, real duration — the living being seems, then, to share 
these attributes with consciousness. Can we go further and 
say that life, like conscious activity, is invention, is unceasing 
creation?" (Creative Evolution, pp. 15-16.) 

13 "Pure duration is the form which the succession of our 
conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it 
refrains from separating its present state from its former 
states" (Creative Evolution, pp. 22-23). 

14 "The principle of causality involves two contradictory 
conceptions of duration, two mutually exclusive ways of 
prefiguring the future in Hhe present. Sometimes all phenom- 
ena, physical or psychical, are pictured as enduring in the 
same way, and therefore in the way that we do: in this case 
the future will exist in the present only as an idea, and the 
passing from the present to the future will take the form of an 
effort which does not always lead to the realization of the 
idea conceived. Sometimes, on the other hand, duration is 
regarded as the characteristic form of conscious states; in 

123 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

look upon the self as free. Thus Bergson intro- 
duces the needed time-transcending element 
into personality. He arrives at the conclusion 
that succession is a reality only for intelligence. 15 
In life, he declares, duration seems to act 
like a cause, that is, it possesses a validity which 
goes outside of the individual experience. We 



this case things are no longer supposed to endure as we do, 
and a mathematical preexistence of their future in their 
present is admitted. Now, each of these two hypotheses, 
when taken by itself, safeguards human freedom; for the 
first would lead to the result that even the phenomena of 
nature were contingent, and the second by attributing the 
necessary determination of the phenomena to the fact that 
things do not endure as we do, invites us to regard the self 
which is subject to duration as a free force" (Time and Free 
Will, pp. 215, 216). 

15 "What duration is there existing outside us? The 
present only, or, if we prefer the expression, simultaneity. 
No doubt external things change, but their moments do not 
succeed one another, if we retain the ordinary meaning of the 
word, except for a consciousness which keeps them in mind. 
We observe outside us at a given moment a whole system of 
simultaneous positions; of the simultaneities which have 
preceded them nothing remains. To put duration in space 
is really to contradict one's self and place succession within 
simultaneity. Hence we must not say that external things 
endure, but rather that there is in them some inexpressible 
reason in virtue of which we cannot examine them at successive 
moments of their own duration without observing that they 
have changed. But this change does not involve succession 
unless the word is taken in a new meaning: on this point we 
have noted the agreement of science and common sense." 
Time and Free Will, p. 227. 

124 



THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

cannot reverse the order of time flown to bring 
back the state or condition that has been borne 
away. 16 

These words (Time and Free Will, quoted 
above, pp. 215, 216, 227) indicate two points 
of difficulty in the doctrine of duration, for which 
the philosophy of change offers no adequate 
solution. 

The first difficulty connects itself with the 
relation to time of the material world, the 
other with duration as the source of causal 
efficiency. We may, with Bergson, confine 
our definition of duration to the human or 
conscious experience of succession in events. 
Duration is that mysterious gathering of all 
the past of an individual and its concentration 
on the point of the present with a view to the 

16 "Here [in life as contrasted with matter] duration certainly 
seems to act like a cause, and the idea of putting things back 
in their place at the end of a certain time involves a kind of 
absurdity, since such a turning backward has never been 
accomplished in the case of a living being. ... In short, 
while the material point, as mechanics understands it, remains 
in an eternal present, the past is a reality perhaps for living 
bodies, and certainly for conscious beings. While past time 
is neither a gain nor a loss for a system assumed to be conserv- 
ative, it may be a gain for a living being, and it is indisputably 
one for the conscious being. Such being the case, is there not 
much to be said for the hypothesis of a conscious force or free 
will, which, subject to the action of time and storing up 
duration, may thereby escape the law of the conservation of 
energy?" (Time and Free Will, pp. 153, 154.) 
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BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

future. It is obvious, then, that by duration 
we refer to what we ordinarily term self-con- 
sciousness. Duration is thus bound up with 
concrete experiences and action, and so is kept 
from flying off into the abstractions of absolute 
idealism. This is an end devoutly to be desired. 
But duration left as a concrete individual 
experience becomes solipsistic and subjective. 
It will not do to neglect or leave out of consider- 
ation this which Bergson mentions as the 
"seeming" duration of material things. Though 
matter be but a constantly repeated movement, 
and without duration in the psychological sense 
we have employed, it does have some relation 
to time which passes out beyond the experience 
of individuals. The waters run to the sea, and 
their rise in the hills is not simultaneous with 
their absorption in the vastness of the deep. 
Even the mountains depart, as under the in- 
fluence of innumerable frosts, seasons, freshets, 
they take their places in the lowliness of the 
plain, or contribute of their substance to the 
treacherous sand-bar which prevents the des- 
perate sailor from reaching his harbor when 
the storm is on the sea. We cannot assume 
duration in the mountains because we cannot 
think of them as conscious of purpose in sinking 
to the level of the plain, or in contributing to 
the shallowness of the sea. But it is certain 
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THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

that we see here the existence of a temporal 
reality which does not depend upon us nor upon 
our perception of it. Lucy Larcom, the Lowell 
mill-girl, had but a glimpse of the sea through 
her attic window, but it was her one hold upon 
the reality of a world that stretched out far 
beyond her knowledge, and mingled in her 
dreams. Yet her "strip of blue" was enough, 
for in it she found God's sweeping garment- 
fold. 

"The sails, like flakes of roseate pearl, 

Float in upon the mist; 
The waves are broken precious stones — 

Sapphire and amethyst 
Washed from celestial basement walls, 

By suns unsetting kissed. 
Out through the utmost gates of space, 

Past where the gray stars drift, 
To the widening Infinite, my soul 

Glides on, a vessel swift, 
Yet loses not her anchorage 

In yonder azure drift." 

Because this temporal mark upon the world 
goes out beyond us we must argue that it has 
some meaning for a creative intelligence which 
persists behind it all. 

Until we reach up to a conclusion of this 

order we shall be at loss to explain the seeming 

duration of the physical world. We shall find, 

in the last analysis, as suggested by a well-known 

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BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

thinker, 17 that both time and freedom derive 
their meaning from the unfinished character 
of the world. However, this world must have 
an identity which the work of finishing does 
not destroy or efface. "Unlimited cooperation 
with God in world-making we have; not, 
however, in ultimate God-making. The reli- 
gious object offers that identity without which 
creative freedom itself would lack for us all 
meaning. 18 

Which is to say that if there be such a thing 
as progress or evolution, an unfinished world 
in state of completion, there must be some 
abiding identity. If the only abiding identity 
be the material world, all thinking and philoso- 
phizing collapses as unimportant. If this is so, 
matter is the only eternal and worth while. 
We can save ourselves only by passing through 
a pantheistic immanence to a controlling, 
creative personality which is the uncaused 
Cause. Familiarity with the fact of uncaused 
causation in our own experience ought to pre- 
pare us for its acceptance in a supreme creative 
power. It is no such preposterous jump as some 
would have us believe. It may be an analogy, 
but it is an analogy with every evidence of fact, 

17 Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 
xvi. 

38 Ibid., p. xvii. 

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THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

and surely as sound as any of the analogies upon 
which science acts. 

Let us turn our attention to the other difficul- 
ty, duration as the source of causal efficiency. 
Duration is ultimately the only causal efficiency 
with which we are acquainted that escapes the 
meshes of necessity woven by the law of the 
conservation of energy. In this admission or 
discovery we have come upon a fact of far- 
reaching importance for our philosophy. Un- 
heralded by trumpets, and unannounced, it is 
in reality the high point of attainment in the 
philosophy of change. In it we have a means 
of escape from mechanism on the one hand, 
and perhaps from determinism on the other. 
In plain words, it means that personality con- 
tains the only grounds we know of unique 
efficient cause or of uncaused causality. The 
mechanists have been laboring for years to 
determine the exact correspondence between 
calories of food and expended energy of thought, 
without a sufficient sense of humor to under- 
stand that they were not touching the question 
of how food energy could become thought 
energy, and that the very crux of their problem 
lay not in showing how the heat calories in the 
philosopher's cabbage correspond with energy 
units spent in the philosopher's brain, but, 
rather in that strange transmutation by which 
129 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

cabbage energy becomes thought energy. What 
we have here in Bergson is the recognition of 
the transcendence of mechanistic law by the 
human personality. It is not what the artist 
eats that determines the worth of his picture. 
The number of calories of food does not fix 
the profundity nor beauty of the musician's 
score. The prophets and thinkers of the world, 
the children of light, have accomplished more 
on a diet of crusts than the children of this 
world who have fared sumptuously every day. 
Man's greatest glory is his power to originate 
action, to be himself a creator, and if we are 
to escape the pitiless and relentless tyrannies 
of mechanism, we cannot do it by pursuing a 
dance of atoms far beyond powers of human 
investigation and experience in an Unknow- 
able. We can at least have the comfort of 
analogy which in any other scheme is entirely 
wanting. We can assume that personality is 
the one source of unique action in the universe, 
the uncaused cause, and we cannot be contro- 
verted by any known facts. 

Objections to this conclusion will be raised 
because we often so unthinkingly assume the 
correctness of the perfectly wooden hypothesis 
of personal automatism. According to this 
hypothesis, we are what we are by the trans- 
mission of hereditary traits, and whatever is 
130 



THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME 

in us can be traced back to sufficient and well- 
defined causes. Yet no genius has written 
himself upon the pages of history who could 
by any possibility be altogether accounted for 
by parentage, training, or the influences of the 
age. Who wrote the sonatas in Beethoven's 
soul? or what human parents gave to Dante the 
voice of "ten silent centuries"? or what age is 
able to account for the undying insight into 
character and the amazing power of literary 
expression to be found in Shakespeare? All 
creative work in the world is exactly of this 
inexplicable character. It is the distinctive 
mark of personality. We have within our- 
selves the key to the mystery of life. 

Viewed in this light, the doctrine of duration 
can be considered the high point in the philos- 
ophy of change, and the one destined to cast 
a flood of light upon the deepest problems of 
thought. 



131 



CHAPTER V 
FREEDOM AND CAUSATION 

Let us come to a consideration of the doc- 
trine of freedom and causation as set forth in 
the philosophy of change. We find freedom 
of personal choice described in these words : 

All seems to take place as if in this aggregate of images 
which I call the universe nothing new could really happen 
except through the medium of certain particular images, 
the type of which is furnished me by my body. 1 

Bergson declares that freedom is the relation 
of the concrete self to its acts. It is an unde- 
finable relation because to describe it is to turn 
it into something past, no longer contingent, or 
else to make it determined and so not free. 2 



1 Matter and Memory, p. 3. 

2 "We can now formulate our conception of freedom. 
Freedom is the relation of the concrete self to the act which 
it performs. This relation is indefinable just because we 
are free, for we can analyze a thing, but not a process; we can 
break up extensity, but not duration. Or, if we persist in 
analyzing it, we unconsciously transform the process into a 
thing and duration into extensity. By the very fact of 
breaking up concrete time we set out its moments in homo- 
geneous space; in place of the doing we put the already done; 

132 



FREEDOM AND CAUSATION 

So every problem of freedom comes back 
eventually to a matter of definition or descrip- 
tion. But freedom has no past; it is something 
only in the moment of action. 3 

The Conception of Freedom in the 
Philosophy of Change 
We have seen at different times during the 
discussion the anxiety which Bergson has 
shown to escape the necessity of mechanical 
causation. Here he sees clearly that such 
necessity not only removes the possibility of 
freedom, but the possibility of explanation as 
well and lands one in the infinite regress. He 
is equally determined to escape from the meshes 

and as we have begun by, so to speak, stereotyping the activity 
of the self we see spontaneity settle down into inertia, and 
freedom into necessity. Thus any positive definition of free- 
dom will insure the victory of determinism" (Time and Free 
Will, pp. 219-220). 

3 "To sum up, every demand for freedom comes back, 
without our suspecting it, to the following question: 'Can 
time be adequately represented by space?' To which we 
answer, Yes, if you are dealing with time flown; No, if you 
speak of time flowing. Now, the free act takes place in time 
which is flowing and not in time which has already flown. 
Freedom is therefore a fact, and among the facts which we 
observe there is none clearer. All the difficulties of the prob- 
lem and the problem itself arise from the desire to endow du- 
ration with the same attributes as extensity, to interpret a 
succession by a simultaneity, and to express the idea of free- 
dom in a language into which it is obviously untranslatable" 
(Time and Free Will, p. 221). 

133 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

of an absolutist determinism, wherein all 
things appear by the fiat of an Absolute will 
which becomes so identified with its world that 
the possibility of moral action is removed from 
man along with the desired freedom. Bergson 
sees that one of the things of which we may be 
most certain is the fact of freedom in human 
experience. This we cannot deny without 
upsetting all codes both intellectual and moral. 
He comes at the point desired by setting forth 
his doctrine of duration. As we have seen 
above, "pure" duration is identical with the 
self. Self gathers up all its past, is all its past 
focused on the one point of the present with a 
view to possible future action. Because this 
freedom is real and not seeming, the self can 
choose between courses of action. 

Bergson is right when he confines the only 
element of freedom we know in the universe 
to a connection with personality. This per- 
sonality, acting and choosing, is plainly the very 
essence of pure duration. It is easy to follow 
this definition where it applies to rational 
beings; it is quite inadequate, considered from 
the standpoint of the ongoing of the nonrational 
and material world; for the duration which we 
have in things is not only of another order, as 
Bergson himself declares, but the difference 
between it and the defined duration of person- 
134 



FREEDOM AND CAUSATION 

ality is so great that such duration as we can 
find in material things of and from themselves 
is utterly incapable of explaining freedom. 
While stating the impossibility of pure duration 
in things, he does yet unconsciously carry over 
into the changes of the material world the same 
idea that he applies to duration in persons. 
The material world is assumed to gather up 
its past into its present, and though this memory 
is unconscious, t is supposed as somehow writ- 
ten into the living organism so that the uncon- 
scious, or unrationalizing cell of the lowest order 
of plant or animal life is reckoned as making a 
free choice, as if it did decide between possible 
courses of action. The plausibility of such a 
conception is quite evident as are the troubling 
questions of science and metaphysics which it 
seems to meet, and the apparent foolishness of 
any effort to refute it. Somewhere we are 
told of the exercise of this freedom by the ten- 
drils of living vines which reach out toward 
supports and which climb toward the sun. Now 
the only difficulty here is the discrepancy 
between the facts and the existence of freedom. 
If we call such action freedom, we must call 
choice as it appears in rationalizing beings some- 
thing vastly more than freedom, for the action 
in the two cases is not analogous. It may, 
indeed, be true that the reaching of the tendrils 
135 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

is due to the presence of light or warmth, or 
the presence of possible support, and that the 
organism responds to such presence. Where 
freedom escapes us in the case is that we cannot 
find any instances where the plant has made 
any choice at all between possibilities; for 
instance, between the possibility of growing 
toward or away from the sun. It has in every 
case responded to the law of its nature, and it 
apparently has no power to act in any other 
way. Changes of structure and adaptation 
may come about through climatic or other 
catastrophe. The potato growing in the dark- 
ness of the cellar may seem quite other than the 
one planted in the field, but that is due not to 
its own choice but to a determined environment. 
If this be dignified with the name of freedom, 
the only kinship with it in the rationalizing 
human being is to be found in the merely 
physical processes which are quite beyond our 
power of determination. It is like the freedom 
we might be assumed as exercising when we 
are born, or when our hearts beat, or our lungs 
expand to the inrushing air, or the choice of 
starving when there is no food and none to be 
obtained. Surely, freedom in the real meaning 
of the term is not exercised in the ongoing of 
such physical activities. Instead, then, of the 
solution of the problem in unconscious action, 
136 



FREEDOM AND CAUSATION 

we have been led only into ever-deepening 
difficulties. The reason is clearly because the 
existence of purpose in a creative being seems 
(and quite unnecessarily) to imply an estab- 
lished determinism in the world outside of man. 

The Value and Possibility of a 
Purposeless Freedom 
If pure duration is necessary to freedom, 
and if pure duration is wanting from all life, 
except from rationalizing, and strictly speak- 
ing, freely choosing life, the only kind of free- 
dom left in the ongoing of a changing and 
evolving physical world is a lawless kind of 
freedom which is not a matter of choice, but 
a mere possibility of being one thing or some- 
thing else. If we no longer have a freedom of 
purpose — and that is denied by our previous 
assumption — we are shut up to a freedom of 
accident. In a world of such a freedom any- 
thing might happen, and foreseeability on the 
part of man in the chemical, physical, or bio- 
logical worlds would be absolutely impossible. 
One might plant potatoes and get grapes, or 
the vineyard might overnight have decided to 
produce thistles. One might extend indefi- 
nitely examples to show the preposterous 
nature of any claim to rule purpose out of the 
freedom of the material world. A purposeless 
137 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

world would be an entirely unintelligible world. 
It is not hard to believe that things do happen 
as if there were a purpose acting somewhere, 
and yet if we look ever so hard we cannot 
discover purpose being exercised within the 
realm of unconscious life. Such choice or 
freedom as there may seem to be is merely 
the choice of responding to conditions after 
certain fixed laws, or of ceasing to live. It is 
evident that unless we introduce some more 
efficient term into our definition it is impossible 
to speak in an intelligent way of freedom in the 
world outside of man. This problem we must 
leave for later consideration. But before leav- 
ing the matter under discussion it will be well 
to consider a related matter. 

Some of the theologians believe that in this 
doctrine of a purposeless freedom there has 
been brought to their aid a new and astounding 
confirmation of the doctrine of miracles. Such 
help, we will be compelled by reflection to de- 
cide, is more apparent than real. It is argued 
that in such a world of freedom, in which even 
God cannot know what is about to happen, 
reserving all his consciousness to the present 
moment (because foreknowledge and purpose 
would reintroduce that reign of determinism 
from which we are escaping), anything might 
happen. If anything can happen irrespective 
138 



FREEDOM AND CAUSATION 

of natural laws, then there is place for miracle. 
When this "anything" happens in contradic- 
tion to common expectations or the ordinary 
course of events, we have a miracle. Such a 
confirmation of the doctrine of miracles is too 
easy to be satisfying or adequate. The slightest 
reflection upon the nature of miracle shows us 
that a miracle which was not the result of di- 
vine foreknowledge, purpose, or determination, 
would be nothing more than an accident. So 
far as its being a revelation of any connection 
in relationship between God and man, it would 
be valueless. Thus it appears that in the 
realm of religious faith, as well as in the realm 
of science, a lawless, accidental, or purposeless 
order of freedom raises many more difficulties 
than it can settle. 

Let us go back now to the thought to which 
we were led in the beginning of this section, 
which is that freedom apart from "pure" dura- 
tion is meaningless. Let us inquire what the 
true implications of such a theory might be. 
We have abundant evidence that up to this 
point we are at one with the philosophy of 
change. 4 We believe it is clear that we cannot 
stop here and find any adequate solution of the 
problem of freedom. As we have already 
pointed out, "pure" duration is merely the 

4 Time and Free Will, pp. 216, 217. 
139 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

term which Bergson chooses to name that 
which we ordinarily understand as personality, 
or self. If this is true, and if it further be true 
that "pure" duration cannot be posited of uncon- 
scious life (as we believe it cannot be) , it follows 
that freedom is inseparable from personality. 
If we are to achieve any evolution or progress 
in the material world, any uniqueness, any 
going beyond the rigid system of necessity to 
obtain new genera or types, we must assume 
purpose and personality in the creative "elan," 
or power. In spite of this fact, which is tre- 
mendous with meaning, there are passages in 
the Creative Evolution which seem to imply 
that the animal and the plant, acting by pure 
intuition, and thus being nearer the center of 
life, are freer than man, who is forever intro- 
ducing his wearisome slavery to ideas, which 
in rationalizing divorce him from life, freedom, 
and reality. 

It is worth our while to consider for a moment 
the aspects of such an intuitional freedom. 
Looked into deeply, it appears that with growing 
powers of reflection come growing powers of 
choice. Improved powers of rationalization 
bring improved powers of self-determination. 
In fact, investigation makes clear that the more 
intuitive and unconscious an act is, even in 
man, the less likely is it to represent anything 
140 



FREEDOM AND CAUSATION 

of what we mean by choice, leaving out of 
account those actions which conscious willing 
and repetition have hardened into habit. Our 
direct impulses are less likely to spring from 
choosing than they are to be unconscious, and 
therefore physically determined response to 
external stimuli. Freedom .appears in greatest 
measure, not in those primal and intuitive 
moments when our action is most unconscious, 
but in those moments when both intelligence 
and rationalizing are at the greatest swing of 
the arc. The larger our knowledge of the 
situation, of the attendant and hidden circum- 
stances, of the laws of action and reaction, of the 
possible choices of action, the greater seems to 
be our freedom. The only example of perfect 
freedom, then, would be found not in the least 
rationalizing, and least conscious living being, 
but in the most conscious and most rationalizing 
being. If the Creative Being be assumed as 
the most intelligent, then to him it is both 
reasonable and scientific to accord the only 
example of perfect freedom. 

This fact is not only in line with the deepest 
religious intuitions of man, it is also in keeping 
with his highest intelligence, and with his most 
scientific knowledge. When Saint Augustine 
uttered that prayer which still stirs the heart 
of men across the ages, bespeaking a "service 
141 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

which alone is perfect freedom/' he was true to 
philosophy, to science, and to life. The most 
perfect freedom comes with the most intelli- 
gent devotion of the full powers of manhood 
to the noblest ideals, and not with a devotion 
which is the most impulsive and unthinking. 

We must remember, however, that it is to no 
such conclusion that the philosophy of change 
has led us. Such conclusions are sure to be 
vitiated by any faulty or incomplete definition 
of the self. When the self is depersonalized 
into a bundle of conscious states, and "pure" 
duration as a sort of impersonal momentum 
which of itself does the choosing, apart from an 
abiding and unchanging self-identity, we are 
on the high road to skepticism. A human self 
which is mostly a collection of conscious states, 
and a creative "elan," which impersonally 
mixes "in Being's flood and Action's storm," 
weaving at the garment of God, may be splen- 
didly poetic in conception, but as touching the 
fundamentals of concrete living, it will be found 
as abstract as it is untrue. 



Of Causation as Freed from Deter- 
minism 
It remains briefly to consider the merits of a 
causation thus freed from the limits of deter- 
minism by assuming that duration in things is 
142 



FREEDOM AND CAUSATION 

different from duration in ourselves, and a theory 
which fails to make the necessary distinction 
between phenomenal and efficient causation. 

Bergson declares that causation cannot take 
the form of a necessary principle as binding the 
future to the present. Seeing this, Descartes 
attributed the regularity of physical phenomena 
to the constantly renewed grace of Providence 
and thus built up a sort of instantaneous meta- 
physics. For Spinoza the apparent relation of 
causality between phenomena melted away 
into a relation of identity in the Absolute. 5 

Bergson's position relative to causation in 

5 "The principle of causality, in so far as it is supposed to 
bind the future to the present, could never take the form of 
a necessary principle; for the successive moments of real 
time are not bound up with one another, and no effort of 
logic will succeed in proving that what has been will be, or 
will continue to be, that the same antecedents will always 
give rise to identical consequents. Descartes understood this 
so well that he attributed the regularity of the physical world 
and the continuation of the same effects to the constantly 
renewed giace of Providence: he built up as it were an 
instantaneous physics, intended for a universe, the whole 
duration of which might as well be confined to the present 
moment. And Spinoza maintained that the indefinite series 
of phenomena which takes for us the form of a succession in 
time, was equivalent in the absolute to the divine unity: 
he thus assumed, on the one hand, that the apparent relation 
of causality between phenomena melted away into a relation 
of identity in the absolute, and, on the other hand, that the 
indefinite duration of things was all contained in a single 
moment, which is eternity" (Time and Free Will, p. 208). 
143 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

things seems in many points analogous to that 
of Descartes. Its vulnerability lies in its 
failure to trace succession in phenomena to 
personal causation. Bergson attributes the 
distinction in causation to the existence of two 
types of causality, personal, or efficient, and 
phenomenal, which is the ordered succession in 
phenomena; that is, causation in ourselves is 
different from causation in things. Let us 
reflect if this assumption alone is a sufficient 
safeguard of freedom or adequate explanation 
of causati on. 6 

6 "It follows . . . that the principle of causality involves two 
contrary conceptions of duration, two mutually exclusive 
ways of prefiguring the future in the present. Sometimes all 
phenomena, physical or psychical, are pictured as enduring in 
the same way and therefore in the way that we do : in this case 
the future will exist in the present only as an idea, and the 
passing from the present to the future will take the form of an 
effort which does not always lead to the realization of the 
idea conceived. Sometimes, on the other hand, duration is 
regarded as the characteristic form of conscious states; in 
this case things are no longer supposed to endure as we do, and 
a mathematical preexistence of their future in the present is 
admitted. Now, each of these two hypotheses, when taken 
by itself, safeguards human freedom; for the first would lead 
to the result that even the phenomena of nature were contin 
gent, and the second, by attributing the necessary deter- 
mination of physical phenomena to the fact that things do 
not endure as we do, invites us to regard the self which is 
subject to duration as a free force. Therefore, every clear 
conception of causality, where we know our own meaning, 
leads to the idea of human freedom as a natural consequence" 
(Time and Free Will, pp. 215, 216). 
144 



FREEDOM AND CAUSATION 

(a) Duration in Things as Different from Dura- 
tion in Self. 

The whole doctrine of freedom in the philoso- 
phy of change is made to hinge upon the doctrine 
of pure duration, and yet there must be a sense 
in which duration in things must find perfect 
agreement with duration in persons, if the sys- 
tem of freedom is to be extended to the uncon- 
scious and material worlds. Whether it is 
possible to maintain two orders of duration, 
without similarity of meaning, and still to keep 
freedom as we are compelled to think, and to 
define it, is the question which next claims our 
attention. If duration in things is essentially 
different from duration in ourselves, we must 
try to determine what this difference would 
be. If we find entering into it exactly the same 
elements of which we are aware in personal 
duration, we may have to acknowledge a rela- 
tionship between the two which is not ade- 
quately represented by merely saying that they 
are different. 

Let us assume, now, that the "elan" as 
creative activity is in being, in contrast to 
the creative activity of the self. One of 
the most obvious elements of personal crea- 
tive activity is the element of time. While 
there is a sense in which the self is timeless as 
retaining its unity through the succession of 
145 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

events, yet, it will be found acting according 
to a well-defined order of succession, that is, of 
time. In this order effect follows cause, and it is 
unthinkable that the order should be reversed. 
But might not this description be equally well 
applied to the "elan vitale"? So far as we have 
any means of knowing, the "elan" acts according 
to the order of succession, that is, progressively 
and not simultaneously. If it did not, the 
term "evolution" would have no meaning in 
reality, but would be a mere panoramic ap- 
pearance spread out before us to deceive us. 
It is clear that the "elan," whatever it may be 
taken to be, acts in accordance with a time 
order. To deny this is to deny the possibility of 
knowledge. 

Furthermore, if there is to be real progress or 
evolution, the "elan" must, like the creative 
energy in ourselves, act not only in accordance 
with its past, but with prevision for the future. 
Of course this means to introduce that element 
of purpose in evolution which has already been 
drummed out of camp; but if we are to save 
ourselves to ways of intelligence, we must get 
it back even if it be under disguise. If the 
"elan" has no prevision for the future, if it acts 
only in accordance with the past, then, in spite 
of ourselves, we are committed to the ways of 
necessity. In such a case we have in the past 
146 



FREEDOM AND CAUSATION 

of the "elan" only what there always has been, 
and we cannot drag forth that uniqueness of 
creative energy which is necessary to intelligible 
progress, or evolution, and is not a series of 
unrelated accidents. 

We are thus brought to the crossing of the 
ways. Either this evolution of which we talk 
is merely phenomenal, exists as a mere mental 
state, and so vanishes from reality, or it is a 
correct description of something that actually 
takes place in the material world. If the first 
consideration be a true one, evolution is a mere 
phenomenalism about which it is futile to talk 
or conjecture. But if it does represent a reality, 
then duration in things, in so far as purpose 
and prevision are necessary to their orderly 
existence, is in no sense that we can determine 
radically different from duration in ourselves. 
In fact, this whole argument for the "elan 
vitale" gets its power by the importation into 
it of those forces of which we are aware in our 
own creative willing and choosing. 

(6) The Only Free Causation is Personal. 

We are thus naturally led to what seems, so 
far as human knowledge can go, a fundamental 
assumption that all free causation is personal 
and all evolution is in some manner purposive. 
The reason for the apparent impasse between 
147 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

duration in things and duration in ourselves 
springs from the failure to discriminate between 
efficient and phenomenal causation. If we make 
this distinction, the contradiction is ended. 
So far as our personal experience is concerned, 
we have abundant knowledge of efficient cau- 
sation in ourselves. In the external world we 
reason not by knowledge but by analogy. We 
witness an order of succession in phenomena. 
The earlier term of the succession we name 
cause and the succeeding term we call the effect. 
If this were the whole of the reality, we should 
have a closed system, an interminable series of 
infinite regress, the future wholly contained in 
the present, and therefore not distinguishable 
from it. All evolution would be at an end. 
Likewise, all freedom would vanish save that 
of the individual. We should arrive at a philos- 
ophy which was not in keeping with the facts. 
The trouble is thatwe cannot, except by analogy, 
go outside of our personal world to watch the 
creative process. We can only partially discern 
it in ourselves. But it is there, and we are 
conscious ^oi the exercise of freedom, those 
choices by which we are building our world 
into something better and greater, and distinctly 
different from that of the present. In our- 
selves we know it as efficient causality. In 
others we behold it as a succession of events, 
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FREEDOM AND CAUSATION 

and, reasoning by analogy, we assume that they 
possess the same creative efficiency and freedom 
that we do. But the argument does not stop 
here. We trace the acts of our fellow men to 
free choices, and account for the appearance of 
the unique by the action of their purpose; so 
when in the world around us we witness effects 
that are not commensurate with their apparent 
causes we have a right to assume that here too 
an intelligent purpose is the active energy 
introducing the elements of progress. Such a 
conclusion, though profound for religion, is not 
essentially a religious conclusion. It is as 
necessary for philosophy as it is for theology. 
Without it we can make no progress in the 
explanation of the relation of God to his world, 
and without it all scientific explanation of evo- 
lution is impossible. 

All free causation is personal, and if there be 
such a thing as evolution, it must be that there 
stands behind the shadows of this mortal life 
and this limiting order of time One who keepeth 
watch over a world which in its essential 
features is his own. 



149 



CHAPTER VI 

THE NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING IN 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE 

In speaking of the nature of reality or being, 
Bergson describes it as the center from which 
things are shooting out. This center is not a 
thing but an activity which he seems to identify 
with God. The analogue of this creative ac- 
tivity we experience in ourselves in every free 
action. The explanation of each increment of 
progress in evolution is beyond our power, but 
we cannot deny that this increment is a fact. 1 

1 "It is natural for our intellect, whose function is essen- 
tially practical, made to present to us things and states rather 
than changes and acts. But things and states are only 
views taken by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, 
there are only actions. ... If the same kind of action is 
going on everywhere, whether it is that which is unmaking 
itself or whether it is that which is striving to remake itself, 
I simply express this probable similitude when I speak of a 
center from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fireworks 
display — provided, however, that I do not present this center 
as a thing, but as a continuity of shooting out. God, thus 
defined, has nothing of the already made; he is unceasing life, 
action, freedom. Creation so conceived is not a mystery; 
we experience it ourselves when we act freely. That new 
things can join things already existing is absurd, no doubt, 
150 



NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING 

He declares that if philosophy yields to the 
metaphysics of science, that is the law of mech- 
anistic cause and effect alone, it can end only 
in metaphysical skepticism. Perhaps he had 
in mind at this point such a skepticism as that 
in which Spencer landed by his doctrine that 
in its essence first cause is Unknowable. Pan- 
theistic deity, eternal matter or a pure Form or 
Absolute, end in the same result, he says, treat- 
ing the living and the inert on the same basis. 
That which we would desire at this point would 
be the recognition of the strangely unaccount- 
able force in which action arises, and which in 
ultimate analysis must be a concrete intelligent 
purpose. 2 



since the thing results from a solidification performed by our 
understanding, and there are never any things other than 
those that the understanding has thus constituted. To 
speak of things creating themselves would therefore amount 
to saying that the understanding presents to itself more than 
it presents to itself — a self contradictory affirmation, an empty 
and vain idea. But that action increases as it goes on, that 
it creates in the measure of its advance, is what each of us 
finds when he watches himself act" (Creative Evolution, pp. 
248, 249). 

2 "What must the result be if it (philosophy) leave bio- 
logical and psychological facts to science alone, as it has left, 
and rightly left, physical facts? It will accept a priori a 
mechanistic conception of all nature, a conception unreflected, 
and even unconscious, the outcome of the material need. 
It will a priori accept the doctrine of the simple unity of 
knowledge and of the abstract unity of nature. 
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BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Of Kant he says : 

True, when he speaks of the human intellect, he means 
neither yours nor mine: the unity of nature comes indeed 
from the human understanding that unifies, but the uni- 
fying function that operates here is impersonal. It 
imparts itself to our individual consciousness, but it tran- 
scends them. It is much less than a substantial God; it is, 
however, a little more than the isolated work of a man, or 
even the collective work of humanity. It does not exactly 
lie within man; rather man lies within it, as within an 
atmosphere of intellectuality which his consciousness 
breathes. 3 

The Implications of Impersonalism as 

to Ground of Being 
In his just criticism of Kant's doctrine of 

"The moment it does so its fate is sealed. The philosopher 
has no longer any choice, save between a metaphysical dogma- 
tism and a metaphysical skepticism, both of which rest at 
bottom on the same postulate, and neither of which adds 
anything to positive science. He may hypostasize the unity 
of nature, or, what comes to the same thing, the unity of 
science, in a being who is nothing since he does nothing, an 
ineffectual God who simply sums up in himself all the given; 
or in an eternal Matter from whose womb have been poured 
out the properties of things and the laws of nature; or, again, 
in a pure form which endeavors to seize an unseizable multi- 
plicity, and which is as we will, the form of nature or the 
form of thought. All these philosophies tell us, in their 
different languages, that science is right to treat the living as 
the inert, and that there is no difference of value, no distinc- 
tion to be made between the results which intellect arrives at 
in applying its categories, whether it rests on inert matter or 
attacks life" (Creative Evolution, 196, 197). 

3 Creative Evolution, p. 357. 
152 



NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING 

God, Bergson attacks a point at which his own 
system is open to criticism, namely, where it 
touches upon the nature of the World-Ground. 
It is evident that he recognizes the untena- 
bility of any system which regards the World- 
Ground as impersonal. One would hardly be 
justified in criticizing a man for not adding the 
arts of the theologian to those of the philoso- 
pher, and yet this element of which he speaks 
is of such importance to an enduring meta- 
physics that it demands further development 
than he has seen fit to give it. There are 
passages in the Creative Evolution and in the 
Metaphysics in which this fundamental appears 
to have been forgotten. When we further find 
statements depending for their plausibility upon 
the impersonal standpoint we can of right 
require that the whole matter be clearly defined. 
A case in point will be noted when we consider 
the definition of God as activity, change, and 
with it the statement that change is original. 
This definition is characterized by the utmost 
vagueness of impersonality and does service by 
reason of its indefiniteness, The trouble comes 
with the previous definitions. We have al- 
ready been told that life is the coming together 
of two independent streams of reality, matter 
and spirit. It is clear, then, that we have a 
double meaning for the term "life," and cannot 
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BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

use it as synonymous with the term "God," 
or "activity," unless, in the first place our con- 
ception of God is the impersonal one, or, in the 
second place, we make God dependent upon 
matter. If "God," being synonymous with 
life, is the result of the intersection of the two 
streams, it is evident that were the two streams 
not to coincide, or were matter absent, there 
would be no God. The very existence of God 
becomes thus dependent upon matter. If 
matter were to dissolve, the Divine Being would 
have to go too. We find ourselves caught 
inextricably in the toils of materialism. Neither 
would the result be more happy if we should 
consider God in an impersonal way as the pure 
spirit which is continually opposing itself to 
matter, out of which opposition rises life. Such 
a scheme introduces that ceaseless conflict of 
dualism which makes God not supreme in his 
world, but only able to carry on an indecisive 
conflict with matter and with evil — in which 
case we should be, like Christophorus, so beset 
with the rival claims of good and evil that it 
would behoove us to set out in search of another 
and mightier God, one who would be more 
worthy of our devotion. 

An added argument against an impersonal 
character for the Divine Being remains in the 
fact that such a Being would be wanting in all 
154 



NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING 

moral characteristics. This might not, at 
first glance, seem a serious matter for philos- 
ophy. But if we are to assume that we live 
in a moral universe, or that morality is a vital 
element in the interpretation of life, we shall 
see that any impersonal assumption regarding 
God makes impossible the maintenance of a con- 
sistent doctrine of the World-Ground. It is 
quite true that by ignoring the fact of personal- 
ity in the Creative Being we can rid ourselves 
at a stroke of a whole brood of troublesome 
questions that cluster about the problems of 
evil and error. But by so doing we admit 
other questions of far graver import. In a 
moral universe to remove from the conception 
of God the presumption of all moral qualities 
is to get rid of the conception of God and to 
leave all to a blind, unthinking demiurge. 
We shall have lost our metaphysical loaf of 
bread, and in its place shall have been given a 
stone, for, after all, the highest distinction in 
man is not intelligence — though many would 
have it that way — but morality. Evidences 
abound that man does not rise to the supreme 
heights of his nature, the climax of his being, 
until he has morally attained. If moral achieve- 
ment is the highest point of life in man, it is 
inconceivable that the Creative Life itself from 
which all life flows should be so much less than 
155 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

its creation as to be without all moral qualities. 
If there be no morality in God, then man be- 
comes the highest God we know, a creator 
beside whom a mere demiurge, vital "elan," 
or what not, becomes relatively unimportant 
and outclassed, The greatest creations which 
the world has to show are not those of blind 
forces, but of moral, spiritual, and aesthetic 
excellence, than which nothing earthly can be 
greater. 

The Meaning of Duration and Change 
in the Creative Being 

Perhaps the need for definition of the relation 
of the supreme creative activity to a changing 
world has already been made sufficiently clear. 
But let us inquire into the necessary character 
of that relationship. 

We have seen how great a place Bergson 
makes for his doctrine of duration as the founda- 
tion stone of freedom. If there is to be freedom 
in the original creative process, it is evident 
that there must be duration there also. In- 
asmuch as there cannot be duration in things 
in the sense of creative freedom, it follows that 
we must posit duration in the Creative Being, 
or God. If, now, change is original, and the 
"elan vitale" is the continuously acting "push" 
on which all life depends, it is obvious that, 
156 



NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING 

whatever we name it, it must include a back- 
lying, intelligent purpose. The reason for this 
is that neither change nor impulse can continue 
to exist and to act as an abstraction. Is change 
a law? Then it must spring from the unwritten 
constitution of the forces of nature, and there 
must lie back of them some force sufficient to 
do the in-writing. Otherwise these multi- 
plied forces and atoms must themselves contain 
the purpose, in which the wonder is their unity 
and cooperation in a pluralistic world. Or do 
we have in the "elan" simply an original impulse? 
Then we must account for its continuance as 
such. In order to have it hold for the present 
it must have been not a single impulse, but a 
continuous succession of impulses. If we are to 
hold to the continued identity of the original 
impulse, we simply reerect the materialistic 
system of necessity. "Vital impulse" cannot 
possess duration in the sense in which Bergson 
intends that we shall understand it, unless it 
possesses consciousness, and, in the moment of 
action at least, intelligent purpose. Thus, if 
we affirm "change" or "vital impulse" as origi- 
nal, we are driven to go behind them to that 
intelligent and enduring unity which abides 
through all processes of change. Just as in the 
human example of duration, there can be no 
"pure" duration, apart from the self-identi- 
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BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

fying personality, so also it is impossible to 
affirm duration in the "elan" without similar 
assumptions of selfconsciousness. 

Must we, then, affirm change in the Divine 
Being? It is evident that we must do so or 
else break completely with the philosophy of 
change. This is where many an earnest soul 
and many a clear thinker will find it impossible 
to remain longer in Bergson's following. Never- 
theless, before making the final break, it may 
not be unprofitable to inquire how far the 
necessities of the system demand us to insist 
upon change as one of the divine attributes. 

One thing is clear: that if this philosophy 
requires absolute change in the Divine Being, 
it must break of its own weight. Every philos- 
ophy of change, if it is to account for progress 
and assume the truth of evolution, must for 
the sake of its own salvation assume somewhere 
a self-identity, abiding above change, in order 
to make possible any assertion of progress whak 
ever. The successive states of change cannot 
themselves be aware of succession unless they 
contain some element of identity that survives 
the change. It is evident that a mere vital 
"elan" which changes altogether from moment 
to moment could in no sense be said to endure, 
nor continuously to repeat itself according to 
Bergson's law of duration as applied to things. 
158 



NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING 

A vital "elan," original change, or formidable 
thrust, which is to account for the continuance 
and ongoing of the world and yet escape both 
the mechanism of materialism and the deter- 
minism of idealism, cannot be held as altogether 
subject to change. 

This view of change involves also the doctrine 
of duration as applied to finite personalities. Any 
view of change which overlooks the enduring 
element in personality defeats its own object. 
It is this abiding self-identity which makes 
possible the summoning of all the past to bear 
its weight upon the decision of the present 
moment, and which has a mind to what its 
existence may be in the moments to follow. 
This self-identity lies at the heart of the problem 
of freedom. Without it both freedom and 
personality are meaningless. 

We have seen how, in order to hold to the 
reality of human personality, we must affirm in 
it an abiding element not subject to change. 
However subject to change it may be, it cannot 
be held to change through and through. Its 
existence as personality is due to the unchanging 
elements in it, its triumph over time, its survival 
of successive states of consciousness, in a world 
of change. In the same manner, any God, 
"vitale elan," duration, or push which did not 
consciously survive the succession of its states 
159 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

could in no sense creatively account for the on- 
going of the world. If we are to follow the 
philosophy of change, what ideas of God might 
be consistently allowed or retained ! 

It will pay to tread softly and to walk humbly 
at this point, realizing that the relation of the 
Creative Being to the spatial and temporal 
order is the great mystery. We cannot start 
into such a problem with the hope of solving 
offhand that which has for ages been the despair 
of philosophers. If we think to do it, we shall 
but give another exhibition of that vanity 
which goes before a fall. It may be permissible, 
however, to offer some suggestions that will 
make our position more endurable, and which 
may indicate the possible directions of the solu- 
tion of the problem raised by the thought of the 
relation of God to a changing world. 

It will appear at the very beginning impos- 
sible to describe the multitude of acts, dispo- 
sitions, moods, choices, and tempers of the most 
earthly of human beings, except in the most 
general terms. We may call him rich, or happy, 
and these may be predominating characteristics 
of his life. But in most lives these would be 
found to be relative terms, which do not shut 
out the possibility of moments of sorrow, nor 
make unnecessary the definition. We do not 
know much about the individual until we 
160 



NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING 

know the instances of his reaction upon life. 
Just as it is impossible to arrive at the estimate 
of a living person except in most general terms, 
so likewise it will surely be not less difficult to 
speak of a Divine Personality except in the most 
general way. 

First of all, if the idea of God is to retain any 
meaning, it must include as a foremost affir- 
mation the abiding unity of self -consciousness. 
This is the heart of what the Christian means 
when he declares that God does not change, 
but abides the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever. If we cannot hold to this, we cannot 
retain the idea of God in any vital way. The 
changelessness of the divine self-identity is the 
bed rock of any true conception of the divine. 
Any Being which cannot erect itself above the 
flux of succession and change would become 
only an element in the process, destined to pass 
away. Any system which fails to note this fact 
of identity in change is destined to confusion. 
As previously noted, "duration," in the sense 
in which Bergson uses that term, would be 
possible only to such self-conscious and abiding 
Being. Perfect self-consciousness would then 
be the foremost affirmation concerning the 
Divine Being that we would need to make. 
But this affirmation instead of being contrary 
to a tenable philosophy of change, would be 
161 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

necessary to it if we are to assume the possibility 
of evolution or progress. If the philosophy of 
change denies this, it denies the foundations 
of its own theories, because change which 
changes everything completely cannot be con- 
scious of change. The affirmation of change is 
impossible unless something is assumed to abide. 
In the second place, if we are to move out 
from analogies in finite personal experience 
we find that it is possible not only for a finite 
self-consciousness to survive the flux of time 
and change, but that it is possible for it to 
retain certain fundamentals of moral and 
spiritual purpose unchanged by the lapse of 
time. The love of a mother is not of a different 
nature, nor is it less perfect when her child is a 
babe than when he is a grown-up man. The 
content of her love may be richer through 
experience; change has entered into it, and yet 
it has continued changeless. So also it may 
be with other moral and spiritual qualities. 
A man may be perfectly honest to-day, and yet 
in the breadth of its exercise that term may 
to-morrow imply in his case a much richer 
content of experience. The honesty of to-day 
may never have had opportunities of deep 
testing, while to-morrow he will have come to 
the setting of the sun equally honest but mean- 
time tried by the hot fires of experience. Yet 
162 



NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING 

he cannot be said to be less honest at one time 
than at the other. To be honest or faithful 
in a few things (if they be all that is given) 
does not differ in perfection from being honest 
or faithful in many things. If we think of God 
as a living, conscious Being, it might be that 
the divine perfection is of some such order, 
forever perfect in self-consciousness, in moral 
purpose and attainment, and yet possessing a 
constantly enriching experience through the 
contribution of the temporal order. 

God must find new occasion for the exercise 
of his faculties in the ongoing of the world if 
you and I as individuals are to mean anything 
particular or personal to him. 

The voices of two parties are sure to be heard 
at this point, and we must turn aside to listen 
to that which they have to say. One will 
protest that such a God could not be a changing 
God. The other will say that such a God 
becomes subject to the temporal order, and 
therefore is no God. 

The difficulties in answering these two objec- 
tions are very great and may indeed be insur- 
mountable. Nevertheless, let us go on in our 
reflection as far as we can. 

The first party must be warned to retrace 
his steps a little in order to consider the following 
facts: that the only example of identity in 
163 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

change of which we know anything is in self- 
conscious personality; that in the human per- 
sonality we do have a first-hand example of the 
possibility of identity in change, both changing 
and transcending change. If, therefore, we 
are to have anything but unmeaning and unin- 
telligible flux which bears away upon its surface 
all identity and all permanence, we must posit 
a Creative Being or Process with at least that 
amount of identity and permanence. 

The second party presents the greater prob- 
lem. In our theistic thinking we first of all 
demand a God who cannot be made by his 
world, and we know this to be a fundamental 
necessity. Some have gone farther and demand 
a God whose life is not influenced by his creation, 
or whose creation is no part of his life. The 
first half of this demand is important and 
needful, for otherwise God becomes subject to 
his world, and the "go" of all things is nothing 
better than senseless matter. That way we 
cannot escape a gross materialism and an event- 
ual skepticism. 

The second half of this demand compels 
further study. If God is to be held to take an 
interest in the moral affairs of man, if there is 
truth in the doctrine of a human incarnation 
of God in the person of Jesus Christ, if the 
moral and spiritual achievements of man are 
164 



NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING 

to be felt by the Divine Life so that they are 
of any real moment to him, then he must be 
something more than an eternally static God, 
self-contained and self -contemplative. If it be 
true that the Divine does note the fall of a spar- 
row, there must be avenues of sympathy and 
contingency which would make the conduct 
of the world a thing of vital interest. The 
burden of proof is certainly upon this second 
party to maintain what would be the meaning 
of human life to an absolutely changeless 
Absolute, to whom there is no contingency of 
human action but only an eternal now. It will 
be found that if we decide to grant the claim 
of the second party to this controversy we shall 
have to deny that any real relation exists 
between God and his world, and that an incar- 
nation is no more than a play of words, a dumb 
drama set upon the stage of life, but without 
vital meaning. If we are to keep to a God to 
whom this changing world is of living interest 
he must be a God whose experience is taking on 
ever-growing and enriching content from his 
experiences with his creation, and at the same 
time he must be held as changeless in his moral 
perfection and purpose. 

But another question even more troublesome 
than this confronts us, which is the possibility 
of any real relation of the Divine Being to the 
165 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

temporal order. If we could settle this, the 
previous questions would vanish of themselves. 
Here we must be satisfied to walk rather by 
faith than by sight, because in matters relating 
to the Divine Personality it is unreasonable to 
expect fullness of understanding, and we must 
be content to abide by some darkness of mys- 
tery. Just what may be the relation of the 
Divine Being to the temporal order, who can 
announce himself competent to declare? It 
appears, however, that the creation is subject 
to a time order and something of what that 
order means to us we can tell. What it would 
mean to him we have no means of knowing. 
If, however, he is thought of as transcending 
the order of time, the questions that have 
vexed us in regard to the content of the divine 
experience would vanish. The problem of a 
growing or changing God would then be seen 
to hinge upon the meaning and reality of this 
time experience. It has meaning for us; we 
believe that it must have some meaning for him, 
because it is a part of his order, but we are 
unable to declare just what the meaning of 
time might be to an Infinite Being. If we fall 
exhausted on the altar stairs of such reflections, 
it is because we have reached the point where 
reflection must give way to faith. 

The problem of the transcendence of time 
166 



NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING 

may become less harassing if we turn our atten- 
tion to the fact of the practical transcendence 
of time to be witnessed in the creative action 
of finite personality. The individual, it is 
true, is not freed from obedience to the temporal 
order, but in all purposive and creative action 
he must rise measurably above the temporal 
order. Just as abiding self -identity is necessary 
to give consciousness of change, so the timeless 
element in personality is necessary to give 
consciousness of succession. By reason of this 
transcendence the person is enabled to gather 
his past into the moment of action, and to 
foresee the result of his willing. In a very 
real sense his act is timeless, or time transcend- 
ing, for past, present, and future are seen as 
one. In so far also as the individual acts 
upon that which is out of sight, as a state or 
condition across seas, or at the receiving end 
of a wireless station, he is transcending the 
spatial order as well. We have, then, in finite 
personality an example in limited scale of a 
time and space- transcending being, acting after 
a temporal and spatial order. This furnishes 
a suggestion — though it is not more than a sug- 
gestion — of the possibility of a Creative Being, 
who, timeless and spaceless, 4 in the sense of not 

4 Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, 
pp. 394, 395. 

167 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

being dependent upon the temporal and spatial 
order, for either self -identity or moral perfection, 
might find a reality, a purpose and a pleasure 
in the creations of such an order. Especially 
might this hold true if space and time were 
necessary to such individual self-consciousness 
as is demanded for the creation of moral and 
spiritual beings of his own order. 

It is plain that, however much of pain there 
may have been in the process, some definition 
of God that will leave him something else than 
forever static, forever self-contained, at infinite 
remove from the actualities of his world, is 
necessary to a very living and practical belief 
in him. We might by psychological analysis 
determine the general terms under which to 
describe God. We might decide on these neces- 
sary general attributes, and yet it is apparent 
that we should be no farther toward the posses- 
sion of him in fact. For he must be held as 
something more than a succession or even a 
combination of psychical states if he is to be 
thought of as possessing personality, or entering 
with any reality into our earthly and changing 
lives. 

The conception presented here may when 

developed be not altogether inadequate for 

faith, because our demand for changelessness 

in the Divine Being depends, not upon a living 

168 



NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING 

experience in him, but, rather, in those moral 
verities that do not pass nor change. At this 
point such a demand is just, for a God whose 
purpose, whose morality, or whose self-identity 
was subject to change would be entirely in- 
adequate for the religious needs of men. 

The philosophy of change has not, however, 
cleared our way to this happy conclusion and 
never can so long as it erects change, the process, 
into the place which can rightly be taken only 
by creative personality, the Ground of all 
Being. 

A True World-Ground Must be Self- 
Creative 

It should have been made clear by the fore- 
going discussion that if we are to apply the 
doctrine of duration to the world outside the 
narrow limits of human action, we must think 
of the Divine Being or "vital" impulse as self- 
creative. Unless we do so we become involved 
in the infinite regress of the mechanist and there 
is no place to stop short of the shadowy vague- 
ness of the Unknowable. This might not be so 
dire a catastrophe if we could comfortably rest 
in such a skepticism. Even if we were to 
assume an Unknowable, it would become 
necessary for us, as it was for Spencer, to bring 
forward abundant assertions of knowledge to 
169 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

meet the simplest explanations of metaphysics. 
Arguing on the empirical plane of cause and 
effect, it will appear impossible to understand 
the possibility of self-creation in God or in 
anything else. At any rate, we could suffer no 
more distressing fate at the hands of any theory 
than that which has come upon us by following 
the ways of empiricism. 

Bergson was very conscious of this fact when 
he criticized the Spencerian method of cutting 
reality up into little bits like the parts of a 
picture puzzle, in order that one might have the 
pleasure of setting them together again in their 
due order and then fondly dreaming that he had 
accounted for all progress. But if the idea of 
self-creativity be difficult here, let us go again 
to the one immediate example of creative 
activity which we have in human personality. 
We find the individual not only producing 
that which cannot be accounted for on any 
rigid system of material cause and effect, but 
we find that in such creative activity he is 
bringing into being new powers within himself. 
It is possible for a man, acting in line with pre- 
conceived purpose, to increase mental and phy- 
sical powers so that he does actually become a 
new man in relation to his world. The exercise 
of his creative activity not only brings to pass 
new things in the world around him; there is a 
170 



NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING 

sense in which the greater and more mysterious 
result is not without him but within. This 
power is the peculiar possession of personality. 
If, then, we can find a real sense in which human 
personality is self-creative, it is not so difficult 
to see that the Creative Being might through 
the very changes which he brings to pass in a 
changing world be realizing his own personality. 
He might be creating himself endlessly and yet 
transcending that world of change through 
which he realizes himself. In such a case it 
might appear that a changing world is necessary 
to a conception of a living, self -realizing God. 
Instead of needing to affirm a God of Change, 
in order to meet the serious problems of meta- 
physics, we really need no more radical affir- 
mation than that of the ancient Hebrews who 
conceived of God as a living God. The more 
we analyze this conception of a living God the 
more are we likely to be impressed with its 
adequateness and satisfactoriness. Reflection 
as well as revelation may show, too, that such a 
living and self-realizing God is necessary as a 
fundamental assumption of any philosophy of 
change that shall be able to survive. 

Such a conclusion would be of a startling and 
profound importance in the bearing it would 
have upon the possibility of a Divine incarna- 
tion. It would go far toward revolutionizing 
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BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

many current theories regarding the relation 
of God to the world. We trust that some 
future day or some future work may see this 
truth scientifically drawn out and developed. 
It might then be seen that the idea of a growing 
God, instead of being repugnant to the religious 
sense, might become the greatest aid to faith 
and theism. It might be seen that the richness 
and content of the divine life demands for its 
increase and fulfillment a revelation and a 
realization of its relationship to its creation 
which could be expressed only in an incarna- 
tion. Thus might be abolished at a stroke 
objections to the incarnation which on the old 
basis are difficult of solution. 

If we stop to consider the commonly assigned 
attributes of the Divine Being, we shall find 
them falling into two general groups. The 
first are those that spring out of moral character, 
and the second are those that spring out of the 
relation of an Infinite God to a temporal and 
spatial world. It is unnecessary to do more 
than briefly mention them. In the first group 
are the metaphysical and moral qualities, 
first cause, holiness, personality. In the second 
group are omnipresence, omniscience, and omnip- 
otence, which wholly concern the relation which 
God must bear to the temporal and spatial 
order. They are, in short, the necessary 
172 



NATURE OF CREATIVE BEING 

affirmations that a man must make that his 
God is not subject to the spatial and temporal 
relations to which he finds himself subject, 
that he is a time- transcending Being who exer- 
cises power and knowledge, free from the 
limitations of human beings. If we are to 
press these general terms as if they themselves 
represent the fullness of the Divine character, 
we shall be as wrong in our estimate of God 
as the functional psychologists are in their 
estimate of man. We cannot possibly by pro- 
ducing these terms produce the Divine Person- 
ality. These are but the beggarly definitions 
by which we attempt to set off and visualize 
for human understanding that which is invisible 
and unthinkable. For that very reason we 
should hold more to the fundamental moral 
qualities without which God is unthinkable. It 
may be found in the end sufficient for faith if we 
hold to the fact of his moral personality, his 
continuous and self-creative power by which 
he is realizing himself in some manner through 
the change and progress of the world of men 
and things. 



173 



CHAPTER VII 

THE FRAGILE FLOWER OF HUMAN 
PERSONALITY 

The Impossibility of an Impersonal 
Freedom 
H. Wildon Carr, one of the most sympa- 
thetic and clear-visioned exponents of the 
philosophy of change, closes a chapter entitled 
"God, Freedom, and Immortality" with the 
statement that so far as the question of per- 
sonality in God, which is no affair of philosophy, 
is concerned, the system has no contribution to 
make; and that as to what lies beyond us in the 
unseen world it has no clear and confident 
note, but that it is reassuring on the supreme 
value, which is freedom. This result will 
hardly prove satisfying, because if metaphysics 
can find no ground for personality, for that 
unique creative power which is manifested in 
personality, about which the philosophy of 
change is so largely written, unless the ultimate 
creative activity is endowed with self-creative 
powers, we have only taken another turn at 
the weary treadmill of dialectic. It is because 
the philosophy of change does not end at this 
174 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

point that it gives encouragement to think that 
another great step has been taken in philosophy. 
In so far as we are given the means to escape 
this ignoble result, so far does the philosophy 
of change achieve success. For it is readily 
seen that, apart from personality, freedom can 
possess no meaning. In order to lift itself above 
the drift of atoms, and to become anything 
more than meaningless and accidental concur- 
rence of atoms which possess no power of self- 
direction, freedom must have both a forward 
and a backward look, and be the result of intel- 
ligent choice. Otherwise things, persons, and 
events are the mere play of driving forces 
behind and around them, absolutely predeter- 
mined. Intelligent choice is a necessary ele- 
ment in all freedom, and freedom cannot be 
maintained nor made intelligible without it. 
The minute we assume impersonality in the 
ground of being, that minute we deny any 
freedom outside of human action, and the 
freedom that we posit in the material world 
becomes but the phantom and shadow cast 
by the human mind. Thus it will appear that 
when Carr admits that the philosophy of change 
has nothing to give us at this point he is indi- 
cating the element of greatest weakness in the 
system. If personality cannot be metaphy- 
sically maintained in conjunction with the 
175 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

common postulates of the philosophy of change, 
the system must be allowed to negate itself. 

Bergson's Definition of Personality 

It is not at all surprising that so close a critic 
has reached this conclusion, for in his definition 
of personality Bergson has at no point appeared 
to strive for exactness. In the early pages of 
Matter and Memory it is assumed that person- 
ality is identical with "my body," which is a 
center of action, one in the midst of the many 
images that make up the material world. 1 

In this shifting of the center of interest from 
"image among other images" to "my body," 
and in the undiscriminating reference to the 
personality, as "image" and as "body" belong- 
ing to "me," he has opened a whole world of 
misunderstanding in regard to the meaning of 
personality. The point may be raised that the 
meaning of personality is one of the darkest of 
all mysteries, and it must be admitted that 
such is the fact. Nevertheless, if we can pre- 

1 "My body is then, in the aggregate of the material world, 
an image which acts like other images, receiving and giving 
back movement, with perhaps this difference only, that my 
body appears to choose within certain limits the manner in 
which it shall restore what it receives. . . . My body, an object 
destined to move other objects, is, then, a center of action; it 
cannot give birth to a representation" (Matter and Memory, pp. 
4, 5). 

176 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

serve a greater measure of clearness by keeping 
to well-defined terms, we shall have made 
advance over a method which hides inconsis- 
tencies under a shuffling of words not synony- 
mous. In the above reference we have the 
personality referred to as an "image," a "body," 
an "object," and an "I." It is exactly this 
indefiniteness which puts an unendurable burden 
on clear thinking. In fact, the whole realm of 
metaphysics is involved in the assumptions of 
this seemingly innocent paragraph. Questions 
will arise whether the self is more than an 
"image"; what are the possible implications 
arising out of the definitions of the world 
as an "aggregate of images" of which the 
personality is one. The basic meaning of the 
word "image" gives us an indefiniteness sug- 
gestive of phenomenality and subjectiveness. 
Or, if we are to prefer the terms "body" and 
"object" as the sources of unique personal 
energy, we must ask whether the motions 
originate in the muscular portions of the body, 
whether decisions are made by the lobes of the 
brain, or whether behind all there is a regnant 
spirit of which the body is but the tool or 
instrument of action. If the former be true, 
we are landed in a materialism from which not 
all the king's horses and all the king's men can 
rescue us. If the latter be true, it is not ade- 
177 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

quate to speak of my body, which is only the 
seat of my personality, as if it were "I." To 
do so is to confuse the carpenter with his plane, 
or the artist with his brush, or the engineer 
with his engine. True it is that the dullness or 
perfection of these instruments will make pro- 
found difference with the work accomplished. 
They may have a reflex action on the creative- 
ness of spirit in him who uses them, but none 
but the stupid would dream that he could 
insert the terms "plane," "brush," and "engine" 
indifferently as exact synonyms for "carpenter," 
"artist," and "engineer." If some one objects 
that in the matter of personality this is insisting 
upon an exactness which in the nature of the 
case is impossible, we should reply that a 
mystery assumed as such is quite endurable 
and often necessary, but that a mystery which 
makes pretension to scientific analysis and intel- 
ligibility under equivocal terms is impossible. 
Nor is Bergson more clear in his description 
of the self-identifying unity of personality. 
Here the unity would seem to be altogether a 
matter of mental concentration. He declares 
that two views are possible regarding the unity 
or manifoldness of personality. If I declare 
self-consciousness one, many inner voices, sensa- 
tions, feelings, and ideas protest. If I declare 
it manifold, my own consciousness rebels, 
178 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

saying that these sensations, feelings, and ideas 
are but effects or states of the undivided self. 
In fact, the manifoldness is the effect of the 
impact of the self on life. 2 

The point that seems to escape us in this 



2 "Is my own person, at a given moment, one or manifold? 
If I declare it one, inner voices arise and protest — those of the 
sensations, feeling, ideas among which my individuality is 
distributed. But, if I make it distinctly manifold, my 
consciousness rebels quite as strongly; it affirms that my 
sensations, my feeling, my thoughts, are abstractions, which 
I effect on my self, and that each of my states implies all the 
others. I am then (all must adopt the language of under- 
standing, since only the understanding has a language) as 
unity that is multiple and a multiplicity that is one; but unity 
and multiplicity are only views of my personality taken by 
an understanding that directs its categories at me; I enter 
neither into the one nor into the other, nor into both at once, 
although both, united, may give a fair imitation of mutual 
interpenetration and continuity that I find at the base of my 
own self. Such is my inner life, and such also is life in general. 
While, in its contact with matter, life is comparable to an 
impulsion or an impetus, regarded in itself, it is an immensity 
of potentiality, a mutual encroachment of thousands and 
thousands of tendencies, which nevertheless are 'thousands 
and thousands' only when once regarded as outside of each 
other, that is, when spatialized. Contact with matter is 
what determines this dissociation. Matter divides actually 
what was but potentially manifold; and, in this sense, indi- 
viduation is in part the work of matter, in part the result of 
life's own inclination. Thus, a distinct sentiment, which 
bursts into verses, lines, and words, may be said to have 
already contained this multiplicity of individuated elements, 
and yet, in fact, it is the materiality of language that creates 
it" (Matter and Memory, pp. 257, 258). 
179 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

discussion is the one that is of the most import- 
ance. While we are analyzing the personality 
as a multiplicity of states, sensations, feelings, 
and ideas, the really important party to the 
transaction is the indivisible "me" that does the 
analyzing. It is always there, abiding above 
and beyond all analysis, and forever refusing 
to be caught up in the multiplicity of which it 
thinks. It is this unanalyzable self that is 
the reality, and we must be satisfied to accept 
this element of personal realism and accept the 
"self" at its face value. That this fact is, under 
better auspices, apparent to Bergson himself 
is to be gleaned from his Introduction to Meta- 
physics, in which he represents personality as 
both multiplicity and unity. The important 
question for philosophy is to determine wherein 
the uniqueness of this unity in multiplicity lies. 
It is something more than a sum of sensations, 
feelings, and ideas. 3 

3 "That personality as unity cannot be denied; but such 
an affirmation teaches one nothing about the extraordinary 
nature of the particular unity presented by personality. 
That our self is multiple, I also agree, but then it must be 
understood that it is a multiplicity which has nothing in 
common with any other multiplicity. What really is import- 
ant for philosophy is to know exactly what unity, what 
multiplicity, and what reality, superior both to abstract unity 
and multiplicity, the multiple unity of the self actually is. 
Now, philosophy will know this only when it recovers pos- 
session of the simple intuition of the self by the self. Then, 
180 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

Inasmuch as analysis cannot give us "anything 
that at all resembles the self," it would seem 
that the ultimate mystery, behind which we 
cannot go, is personality itself. The conscious- 
ness of personality seems to be gained by simple 
intuition and not by analysis. This interior 
reality is something enduring through time and 
surviving the multiplied states of consciousness. 
This enduring consciousness is memory with 
something additional, for it is conscious of the 
present moment and brings all the past to the 
point of action. 4 



according to the direction it chooses for its descent from this 
summit, it will arrive at unity or multiplicity, or at any one 
of the concepts by which we try to define the moving life of the 
self. But no mingling of these concepts would give any- 
thing which at all resembles the self that endures" (Intro- 
duction to Metaphysics, pp. 38, 39). 

4 "There is one reality, at least, which we all seize from 
within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our 
own personality in its flowing through time — our self which 
endures. . . . When I direct my attention inward to contem- 
plate my own self (supposed for the moment to be inactive), 
I perceive, at first, as a crust solidified on the surface, all the 
perceptions which come to it from the material world. . . . 
Next, I notice the memories which more or less adhere to 
these perceptions, and which serve to interpret them. These 
memories have been detached, as it were, from the depth of 
my personality, drawn to the surface by the perceptions that 
resemble them; they rest on the surface of my mind without 
being absolutely myself. Lastly, I feel the stir of tendencies 
and motor habits — a crowd of virtual actions more or less 
firmly bound to these perceptions and memories, All these 
181 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

If the impossibility of pushing personality 
to the final analysis is recognized, it seems 
hardly necessary to maintain that it is a matter 

clearly defined elements appear more distinct from me, the more 
distinct they are from each other. Radiating as they do 
from within outward, they form, collectively, the surface of 
a sphere which tends to grow larger and lose itself in the 
exterior world. But if I draw myself in from the periphery 
toward the center, if I search in the depths of my being that 
which is not uniformly, most consistently, and most enduringly 
myself, I find an altogether different thing. 

"There is beneath these sharply cut crystals and this 
frozen surface a continuous flux which is not comparable 
to any flux I have ever seen. There is a succession of states, 
each of which announces that which follows, and contains that 
which precedes it ... . This inner life may be compared to the 
unrolling of a coil, for there is no living being who does not 
feel himself coming gradually to the end of the role; and to 
live is to grow old. But it may just as well be compared to a 
continual rolling up, like that of a thread on a ball, for our 
past follows us, it swells incessantly with the present which 
it picks up on its way; and consciousness means memory. 

"But actually, it is neither an unrolling nor a rolling up, 
for these two similes evoke the idea of lines and surfaces 
whose parts are homogeneous and superposable on one 
another. Now, there are no two identical moments in the 
life of the same conscious being. Take the simplest sensa- 
tion, suppose it constant, absorb in it the entire personality; 
the consciousness which will accompany this sensation cannot 
remain identical with itself for two consecutive moments, 
because the second moment always contains, over and above 
the first, the memory that the first has bequeathed to it. 
A consciousness which could experience two identical moments 
would be a consciousness without memory. It would die 
and be born again continually" (An Introduction to Meta- 
physics, pp. 11, 13). 

182 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

of degree, as Bergson does when he speaks of it 
as a complete organism more easily distinguished 
as such than animals and plants. This ascend- 
ing ease of distinction, he thinks, is due to 
ascending degrees in individuality. 5 The root 
meaning of the term "individuality" is what 
the term implies, its distinction from other 
individuals. We certainly should make no 
progress in number did we not assume the 
integers of our computation to be distinct in 
their own right. There would be nothing 
but confusion in attempting to count two units 
as if they were one or as if they were partially 
identical. We could not speak of the first unit 
as being a unity only in degree without at least 
falling into the abstractions of theoretical math- 

5 "While the subdivision of matter into separate bodies is 
relative to our perception, while the building up of closed-off 
systems of material points is relative to our science, the living 
body has been separated and closed off by nature herself. 
It is composed of unlike parts that complete each other. It 
performs diverse functions that involve each other. It is an 
individual, and of no other object, not even of the crystal, can 
this be said, for a crystal has neither difference of parts nor 
diversity of functions. No doubt it is hard even to decide 
in the organized world what is individual and what is not. 
The difficulty is great even in the animal kingdom; with 
plants it is almost insurmountable. This difficulty is, more- 
over, due to profound causes, on which we shall dwell later. 
We shall see that individuality admits of any number of 
degrees and that it is not fully realized anywhere, even in 
man" (Creative Evolution, p. 12). 
183 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

ematics. In other words, there must be estab- 
lished meanings to the terms we use. If we 
intend to use the term "individuality" or 
"personality' ' with a definiteness that will 
enable us to make progress, we must retain the 
meaning as we have defined it at least until the 
equation has been worked out. It will not do 
to change the quantity of the unknown symbol 
in the process of finding its value. 

Out of the discussion we find emerging two 
ideas of the self; one, the self of intuition, of 
action; the other, the self of intelligence, of 
rationalization. What the self of action and 
intuition would be apart from intelligence it is 
impossible to determine, One great object of 
the philosophy of change is to end the warfare 
between the conflicting ideas of mind as matter 
and mind as spirit. It understands very 
clearly the impossibility of explaining the facts 
either by materialism alone or by idealism alone. 
It sees that realism must issue in denying the 
reality of matter, and materialism must end in 
phenomenalism. What it fails to see is that the 
rift it makes in personality by the division into 
intuition and intelligence is a gulf as impossible 
to bridge as was that of the older dualism. If 
there is one thing above another that distin- 
guishes personality, that makes it what it is, 
it is the indivisible presence of intelligence in 
184 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

intuition. It may do for the sake of analysis 
to speak as if at one end of a line it were possible 
to set a mark which is pure perception, not dis- 
tinguishable from matter, and at the other end 
a mark which will represent pure memory, indis- 
tinguishable from spirit, but in actual life these 
points are inseparable. If we are to get at the 
concrete facts, we must reach them by a certain 
personal realism which includes all. We be- 
lieve that there are many evidences that this 
is the goal after which Bergson is striving. It 
is no help toward that goal, it is introducing 
only confusion and unclearness, to speak of the 
self as if there were on the one hand a self of 
action, and on the other a self of intelligence. 
Whatever intelligence the self has is brought 
to bear from moment to moment, is a part of 
action, of experience of duration, because any 
concrete or real intelligence is related to the 
self at the moment of action and unrelated intel- 
ligence is impossible. We have in the setting 
forth of this order of dualism a situation analo- 
gous to that against which Bergson contends. 
This is the situation of the sensationalists who 
regard ideas as if they could exist apart from 
life and action, stored in the brain as in a ware- 
house, filed and ticketed and ready to come 
forth on demand. While such an explanation 
of the relation may give great comfort to the 
185 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

imagination, may lead to a semblance of prog- 
ress, and may promise the solution of the deepest 
mysteries of the self, it will be found on examina- 
tion one of those solutions which consist in 
taking out what one has already put in. 

One writer 6 has correctly called attention to 
the fact appearing in this connection, that 
individuation, or personality arising from im- 
pediments in the way of the "elan," furnishes 
souls that differ only as they mutilate the mes- 
sage which all alike are trying to repeat. The 
justice of this criticism will appear to us the 
moment we consider the definition of funda- 
mental reality under the figure of the rising 
stream which continually resists the condensing 
and falling drops of water which itself creates, 
and which correspond to matter. Having 
mentioned it in another connection, we waive 
here the right to the criticism that this assump- 
tion places matter as an element in its own 
genesis, and the attendant question of how we 
came by the "original" matter which was before 
creative spirit began to resist it. Let us come 
directly to the consideration of personality as 
one of the products thrown off by the unceasing 
stream of spirit in its eternal contest. We ought 
not perhaps to dwell much on the startling 
analogy which the illustration furnishes of an 

6 Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, p. 104, 
186 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

identity in definition of personality and matter, 
though we cannot prevent this ghost from 
rising to disturb our speculation. The question 
which really annoys is a deeper one, and on it 
hang greater issues. If this is a true description 
of personality, we inquire whether the dis- 
tinguishing feature of personality be matter or 
spirit. If akinness to matter is the mark of 
personality, whence that unique creative energy 
which we behold in persons? Instead of re- 
ducing personality to the lower rank of matter, 
might it not be quite as reasonable to posit it as 
the rising tide of spirit which lifts matter with 
it from the lower to the higher order? Is per- 
sonality an impediment in the way of the free 
activity of the vital "elan," or is it not, rather, 
the expression of that "elan" in its rising and 
successful conflict with matter? One thing 
is certain, at this point we stand at the very 
crossroads. It may seem unimportant which 
way we take. The signs on the guidepost may 
not indicate the deeper significance in the goals 
to which they lead. But one way leads directly 
to the assumption of the triumph of materialism, 
and the eventual conclusion that matter is the 
fundamental reality against which the tides of 
spirit exhaust themselves in vain. Along this 
road, all that we discover leads us to find reality 
in the running down of spirit. We pass through 
187 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

a grand continuous graveyard in which we can 
see nothing until after it is dead. If this be the 
case, it is quite foolish to speak of evolution, 
for all change must be toward devolution. To 
use an Irishism, our only progress is a retreat. 
On such a basis we can never know anything 
about the "elan" except to witness the melan- 
choly evidences of its failure before the more 
powerful influences of matter. This way we 
have not "elan vitale," but the deadness of 
inertia. This blind alley will always misguide 
us so long as we consider matter the fundamental 
reality, or so long as we think of matter and 
spirit as two independent streams of reality, 
or so long as we adopt the standpoint of imper- 
sonalism. It is only as personality becomes 
the source of all things and all lesser person- 
alities are measurably superior to matter, that 
we can escape the impasse and breathe again 
the air of freedom. 



Disappearance of the Ground of Per- 
sonal Immortality 

Another factor in the treatment of the 
problem of personality by the philosophy of 
change needs now to be mentioned. In the 
definition of personality just considered there 
is no ground for the positing of immortality. 
18$ 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

This will to some minds seem quite unimportant, 
to others it will appear a grave defect in any 
system of philosophy. Our own feeling is that, 
aside from the demands of religious faith, there 
is a certain pragmatic demand which insists that 
philosophy shall at least not be inimical to the 
claims for personal immortality. Usually, that 
which is a universal demand of the human spirit 
will be found to reach root deeply into reality 
and life. This demand will increase if we 
assume that personality is necessary to all 
duration. If there be no personality in the 
creative "elan," we can have neither progress 
nor intelligibility in the universe, and it 
might be that the preservation of those person- 
alities which are the feebler and lesser lights of 
itself would be the supreme demand in its 
experience of duration. If human personality 
has any light to throw upon the problem it is 
all in this direction. The supreme interests of 
our own duration cluster about other person- 
alities which are bound to us by one tie or 
another. Certain it is that when these rela- 
tions are broken we are filled with a sense of 
the futility and emptiness of life. The inten- 
sity of this feeling has been profoundly expressed 
in the poem of an Indian woman. 7 



7 Sarojini Naidu, in "The Golden Threshold," p. 46. 
189 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

"Lamp of my life, the lips of Death 
Have blown thee out with their sudden breath; 
Naught shall revive thy vanished spark .... 
Love, must I dwell in the living dark? 

"Tree of my life, Death's cruel foot 
Hath crushed thee down to thy hidden root; 
Naught shall restore thy glory fled .... 
Shall the blossom live when the soul is dead? 

"Life of my life, Death's bitter sword 
Hath severed us like a broken word, 
Rent us in twain who are but one .... 
Shall the flesh survive when the soul is gone?" 

If our human lives were to be deprived of all 
interest in other personalities, it is difficult to 
tell what worth, beauty, or inspiration would 
be left to us. Our religion takes form and 
becomes of vital value and comfort only as it 
centers around personality. Not only is it 
difficult to extract much of value from the 
worship of a Deity who is an abstract force, 
but as we are constituted it is impossible. The 
anthropomorphizing tendency in man, though 
it is often abused, is also often misunderstood 
and slandered. The creative energy possesses 
meaning for us only as it is akin to ourselves. 
This demand is as deep and insistent as our 
nature and cannot be denied. The demand 
for an incarnation is not an insistence on low- 
ering God to our limited human state, but is, 
190 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

rather, the insistence that the best that is in 
us is identical with and bears kinship to that 
Goodness which we conceive to lie at the heart 
of Deity. Some day men of greatly diverse 
beliefs will recognize this as the common 
ground of a larger faith. Returning to the 
argument, there is this to be considered. The 
corollary of personality in the creative "elan" 
is the continuance of personality or immor- 
tality in lesser intelligences. If we are to 
consider the interests that would attract the 
mind of such creative personality, it would 
evidently not be the lesser and material crea- 
tions which formed the steps of evolution, but 
personality itself. If the scientist loves to 
declare the indestructibility of matter, it is 
quite as reasonable to believe in the indestruct- 
ibility of that which is the culmination of the 
creative process. If any portion of the creative 
energy springs from an endeavor to find itself, 
to realize larger aspirations and purposes, we 
are forced to believe that these interests will be 
centered in those creations which are most like 
itself, and which represent its highest attain- 
ment. It certainly would be false to all that 
we know of human nature to cast to the void 
the self-conscious products of one's own love 
and care. Such action becomes self-destructive. 
To acknowledge the reality of the soul and of the 
191 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

supreme human interests involves the logical 
belief in immortality. For him who denies 
these higher realities we have no argument. 

To one who has deeply considered life or who 
has entered profoundly into its experiences it is 
impossible to take the trivial and fantastic view 
assumed by some commentators on Bergson. 
Immortality is a metaphysical question because 
it is linked indissolubly with one's conception 
of the World-Ground. It is of the very essence 
of personality to resent such a conclusion 
because of the indignity cast upon the highest 
human values. Not only in moments of deepest 
intuition, but likewise in moments of deepest 
insight and intelligence we feel the deeper 
truth that personality lives beyond the fickle 
and passing environments which close it in, 
and we catch the truth of the picture drawn by 
Frederic Lawrence Knowles in "The Tenant:" 8 

"This body is my house — it is not I: 
Herein I sojourn till in some far sky, 
I lease a fairer dwelling, fit to last 
Till all the carpentry of time is past. 
When from my high place viewing this lone star, 
What shall I care where these poor timbers are? 
What though the crumbling walls turn dust and loam — 
I shall have left them for a larger home. 
What though the rafters break, the stanchions rot, 



8 Love Triumphant, p. 192. 
192 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

When earth has dwindled to a glimmering spot! 
When thou, clay cottage, fallest, I'll immerse 
My long cramp't spirit in the universe. 
Through uncomputed silences of space 
I shall yearn upward to the leaning Face. 
The ancient heavens will roll aside for me, 
As Moses monarched the dividing sea. 
This body is my house, it is not I, 
Triumphant in this faith I live and die." 

A Doctrine of Personality is Funda- 
mental to Metaphysical Under- 
standing 

It has become a truism in philosophy that the 
reality of personality is fundamental to intelli- 
gence; that if we cannot believe in our own 
reality, we cannot be sure of any knowledge 
whatever. What is not so generally recognized 
is the fact that personality is a metaphysical 
as well as an epistemological necessity. If the 
second demand be conceded, the first also must 
be granted. Understanding implies not only 
an intelligent personality, it implies also an 
intelligible world. An intelligible world can 
proceed only from an intelligence which in 
some way measures up to the meaning of per- 
sonality. That there should be some mystery 
about this creative personality is not to be 
wondered at, since the mystery of our own 
creative wills is the despair of philosophy. 
193 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

The universe can be seen and understood only 
from this personalistic standpoint. Whatever 
vaticinations we indulge we inevitably circle 
round to this necessary affirmation, and it is the 
fundamental one in life. Any philosophy, 
therefore, which hopes to get along without 
accounting for the deepest fact in life can never 
permanently satisfy the mind nor fulfill the 
demand that intelligence is sure to make. 

Just as power in the state is measured by its 
accord with truth, righteousness, and honor, 
and just as failure at this point introduces 
principles of ruin to the state; just as a structure 
is no stronger than the foundations on which it 
is built, or an army is powerful only in keeping 
with its food supply, so any system of philosophy 
which does not answer to the deepest needs and 
instincts of the human spirit cannot survive. 
Any theory which seeks to omit the ultimate 
explanation is no explanation at all. It may 
be a valuable exercise in dialectic, or an exhila- 
rating run about a circle, but there has been no 
progress and no gain. So any philosophy which 
is unclear in its definition of personality and its 
relation to fundamental being is unclear in all. 
It furnishes an illustration in philosophy of 
an analogous truth oft quoted in another realm, 
that he who is guilty of the breach of one com- 
mandment is guilty of all. 
194 



SECTION II 
PERSONAL REALISM 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

Realism in General 
Mr. Bertrand Russell, 1 referring to the 
paradoxes of Zeno, points out that in the case 
of Hercules overtaking the tortoise, and in the 
case of the flying arrow at rest during each 
moment of flight, realism considers the reality 
as a continuum rather than as an infinite series 
of jumps. This reference illustrates the aim 
of most modern realism which wearies of an 
unending dialectic that loses itself and its 
reality in the infinite series of mathematical 
calculation. Realism has done this service 
for the world, that it persists in clinging to the 
most obvious, whatever else it may have to 
relinquish. Just because life itself is some- 
thing more than definition or idea, because at 
no point can we seize upon it in our most vivid 
intellectualizations, realism is given its great 
opportunity in the history of speculation. Seen 
at its highest and best, it is the formal effort 

1 Monist, 1913, p. 484. For more complete discussion see 
.Russell, Scientific Method in Philosophy. 
197 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

to stop analyzing away the true nature of 
being. In so far as it is a protest against the 
madness of a dry scholasticism, it is of unreck- 
oned value. 

Neo-Realism 

Neo-realism aims to perform this service 
for thought by putting forward two funda- 
mental propositions. 

The first is that the object of perception is 
absolutely independent of consciousness. The 
second is the identity of the real object with the 
actual percept, which in the case of one school 
of neo-realism, leads to the position that the 
reality is in the relation between subject and 
object. 

Now, if an older form of realism failed by 
ignoring the mental and spiritual facts in the 
problem of life, making matter the only inde- 
pendent reality, and if idealism, coming from 
an opposite direction, failed because it ignored 
the reality which exists independent of the 
individual experience, it will in like manner 
probably be true that neo-realism, seeking a 
unity independent of personality, must also 
fail. Our only hope can be in some system 
which, whatever its troubles, will not overlook 
any -essential feature of the problem. Neither 
he who considers thing at the expense of 
198 



AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

thought, nor he who considers thought at the 
expense of thing, nor he who considers thought 
and thing under the form of abstract relation 
as the fundamental reality, has the elements of 
the equation necessary for a solution of the 
problem. There is another entity more abiding 
than the fleeting world, itself transcending the 
passing perception, more than thought or any 
mental content, specifically but perilously ig- 
nored, and it is the self -identifying person. The 
unity gained by idealism is a false unity, rest- 
ing on a partial world; the unity gained by 
realism is gained by assuming a partial world; 
the unity gained by neo-realism arises through 
an arbitrary attempt to make one by fiat the 
sundered sides of consciousness. 

But there is a unity which is neither the result 
of crude and unconsidered sense-thinking, nor 
of the strained effort of abstraction, nor of a 
philosophizing into unity that which men 
separate in thinking, namely, subject and object. 
This indivisible unity which none can doubt 
nor dissever is the unity which abides in per- 
sonality itself. Take, for instance, the matter 
of perception. Upon reflection it will be seen 
that the crux of the problem of perception lies 
in self-identification and not in the absence of 
self-defining qualities. I do not know things 
because in some Nirvanal trance my perceptions 
199 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

become identical with objects, nor because 
objects become "me," nor because I become 
objects, "entering into them," as Bergson 
declares. 

It is the self-defining quality of the human 
understanding that makes perception possible. 
Unless I can relate a thing to myself in the 
spatial or temporal order it is impossible for me 
to perceive it at all. This self or personality 
is no mere product of the juxtaposition of mind 
and matter, but is self -directive. It can per- 
ceive what it will, and can measurably neglect 
to perceive what it will. It is greater than its 
surroundings, for it has power to transcend or 
to overcome all of a lesser order than itself. 
When it comes to other personalities, if person- 
ality be the fundamental reality, it finds 
itself working within the orderly limits set 
by a supreme personality which upholds the 
world and all lesser personalities to its own 
transcending purpose. The lesser personality 
finds itself compelled to limits of a certain 
moral and physical order. This is the point 
at which the individual personality finds itself 
impotent against the general good which is 
written into the constitution of existing things. 

Personal Realism 

It is to be noted that personal realism differs 
200 



AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

sharply from neo-realism in this, that neo-real- 
ism assumes relation as the fundamental reality. 
Not mind alone, as in idealism, nor matter 
alone, as in materialism, but the actual relation 
of mind and matter as joined in the act of per- 
ception is the neo-realistic claim for the funda- 
mental reality. It will be easily seen that 
neo-realism thus leaves no provision for con- 
necting these varied and multiform perceptions 
into any series or unity. Each is reality 
itself in the moment of being. Each reality 
arises like a bubble on the waters of life and is 
immediately lost as its place is taken by other 
perceptions. There could be no life, no self- 
identification, for all would rise and pass away 
in the act of perceiving. 

(a) Personal Realism Affirms Indivisibility of 
Personality. 

Personal realism, on the other hand, con- 
tends for the indivisibility of personality rather 
than for that of relation. It holds that the 
relator rather than the relation is the finality. 
This claim for indivisible and unanalyzable 
consciousness in perception, which is personality, 
constitutes the realistic element. 

The question may be asked, "Why call it 
realism at all?" The answer must be the 
obvious kinship with the prevailing modern 
201 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

type of realism. Personal realism will be 
found, first of all, holding to the fact that 
reality is a connection and a relation which is 
indivisible, except in the abstract analysis of 
the psychologist, an analysis which never can 
be identified with the fact, but can only sym- 
bolize it in order to understand it. So far, the 
theory is in strict agreement with both Bergson 
and the neo-realists. But personal realism 
holds that we cannot stop here without 
imminent peril to our philosophy. Reality 
never exists in the abstract, but only in the 
concrete instance. The relation of mind and 
matter, then, to be rigorously realistic, exists 
only in the specific, concrete cases in which 
personality is involved. The essential reality 
is in the relator and not in the relation. To 
hold the relation as fundamental is to drop 
into the difficulties of idealism, if one is to 
pursue to the end a course of logical consistency. 
A system of relations built of disconnected 
perceptions could yield nothing of knowledge 
or intelligibility. We should have a world of 
relations with no power of interpretation. 
The experiences of the individual would not 
hold together from moment to moment, and 
science would be impossible. It is only because 
of the survival of a self-identifying element 
which does the relating, that either the indi- 
202 



AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

vidual or the changing world possesses meaning 
or value. What, then, is the indivisibility in the 
act of perception or in the act of life, if you will, 
which stolidly refuses to be caught up and fully 
expressed by any rationalization, or analysis 
which the mind may bend upon it? This indi- 
visible unity is a personality, the self-identi- 
fying unit in the act of perception. 

We believe that in this position we come 
nearest the heart of a consistent realism. The 
moment we assume relation as the fundamental 
reality, that moment we have begun that process 
of intellectualization against which Bergson 
protests as leading away from actual expe- 
rience. We cannot get to relation until we 
have gotten away from the primary act, which 
is life, to an analysis of it, which is idealism. 2 

2 "Ce j'y decouvre, c'est une individuality concrete et 
vivante, une source permanente d'energie. Sans doute je 
generalise mon moi, comme tout le reste; je le depouille aussi, 
par une analyse mentale, de ses modes et de ses attributs: je 
le mets a part et rensois de cette maniere a le convertir en une 
forme dessechee, indeterminee, impersonelle, qui ne vit ni 
ne sent. Mes se produit incolore de ma raison, cet etat 
derive du moi n'est pas plus le moi dont j'ai conscience qu'un 
squelette n'est un homme ou qu'un mappemonde n'est la 
terre. Le moi, pris dans son etat naturel et sur le vif, c'est 
cette energie tou jours en travail, qui percoit et s'apercoit, 
qui induit et deduit, qui jouit et souffre, qui se passionne de 
haine et d'amour, qui delibere, veut et meut. Le moi reel, 
c'est une force sans cesse agissante et reagissante et de mille 
manieres a la fois. Rien, evidemment, ne ressemble moins 
203 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

In this neo-realism is nearer, much nearer, to 
idealism than either the neo-realist or the 
idealist would be willing to admit. But when 
the neo-realists ask us to consider the act of 
perception as a "putting of ourselves in things" 
they are certainly asking after a rationalization, 
a transcendentalization, if you please, which is 
nothing more than a figure of speech. The 
primary fact of perception is a person who 
relates the world to himself. 

For instance, Perry claims to avoid the dual- 
ism of realism by substituting the idea of rela- 
tion for that of substance. 3 But, with Perry, 
perception is a relation of conscious subject to 
environment. They are not separated into 
two spheres. Their relation is the fact. He 
hopes thus to get over the dualism between 
subject and object. Error, he declares, is due 
to subjectivity. This can mean simply that 
whatever does the relating relates wrongly, 
draws the wrong conclusion. So at a stroke 
is reerected the dualism of which he had dis- 
posed. He declares the cardinal principle of 
neo-realism to be the "independence of the 



a ces symboles amortis et inertes que l'entendement se fait 
des choses et qui n'ont d' existence que pour lui et par lui: 
rien ne ressemble moins a un etre logique que le moi" (Piat, 
La Personne Humaine, p. 381). 

3 Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 308. 
204 



AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

imminent." 4 He maintains the independence 
of external objects, he now seems to maintain 
the independence of ideas, because the idea is 
not the product of immediate perception but of 
perceptions worked upon by something which 
holds supervisory and dictatorial powers, i. e., 
by the human personality. Thus his impersonal 
realism vanishes. 5 

I am quite aware that the assumption that 
the primary fact of perception is a person who 
relates the world to himself does not settle the 
question of metaphysics. The difficulty arising 
from this postulate by a demand for person- 
ality in the Supreme Being will be discussed in 
another connection. But this simple assump- 
tion concerning perception will at least avoid 
the issues which pluralism immediately thrusts 
upon neo-realism at this point. 

Here it seems strange that there should have 
been no deeper searching of heart, because, in 
the very nature of the case, the pluralism which 
necessarily follows the usual affirmations of neo- 
realism not only negates the reality of knowl- 
edge of the world, it denies to personality 
any place in its system. The first point is 
disclosed in this: that a consistently pluralistic 
universe could be only an inexplicable accident. 

4 Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 313. 
6 Compare Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 326. 
205 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

For any progress or any understanding there 
must be a certain unity of cooperation. A strictly 
pluralistic universe is a contradiction of terms. 
If there is coordination between its various 
elements, if there is to be any understanding, 
there must be some unity or coherence in the 
understanding subject. At least it must be 
granted that if the subject of experience is 
altogether involved in the universal flux, a 
passing mood of psychical states and varying 
consciousnesses, all dissolves as surely into 
nothing as if we were to lose ourselves in the 
Absolute of extreme idealism. To repeat what 
has already been said, the two systems are 
closer than their advocates think. 

The only unity, then, is not a unity of things, 
of absolutes, nor of relations considered apart 
from appearance in concrete personalities. The 
unity is in personality itself. The only charter 
which we possess for community of under- 
standing and interpretation of our world lies 
in personality, finite and supreme. Unless we 
reach this standpoint the explanation of science, 
of mathematics, of sociology, of language itself 
casts upon us an intolerable burden. We do 
perceive the world after an unaccountable 
similitude; the procession of cause and effect 
does bear to ignorant and learned, to good, bad, 
and indifferent, very identical meanings; quan- 
206 



AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

tity and division in mathematics speak with 
certain inevitable exactnesses which the wildest 
philosophy cannot ignore or abrogate. To 
attempt it would land the victim in the psycho- 
pathic ward of the hospital. There are social 
relationships which bind all men of good will 
with unbroken bonds, and men of ill will with an 
inexorable imperative. The individual cannot 
decide to have a language of his own, insisting 
on his own peculiar meanings for the sounds 
of speech without danger to life and limb on the 
crowded streets of our cities. The cry of 
"Wolf," once infilled with a meaning strange 
to the generality of men, may prove embar- 
rassing to the man who insists on so using the 
term. It ought not to be difficult to see in the 
face of multiplying instances that this unity, 
upon which thought, science, institutions, and 
action in the world are founded, is a unity that 
grows out of the nature of personality. If it 
be asked, further, how a world of matter can 
correspond to a world of intelligences, it needs 
only to affirm that the source of things and 
intelligences is a common one; that both systems 
exist by virtue of a supreme personality which 
unceasingly wills both into being. In such a 
case the problem springs not from the strange 
yet familiar coordination, the wonder arises 
from any gaps or failure in coordination. As 
207 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

a matter of fact, the most perplexing questions 
of life do spring exactly from these sources. 
The world is brought into unity, not because 
the diverse streams of reality spring from a 
common, far-off push, but because they exist 
in time as a part of the continually exercised 
creative will, And here at last is freedom, 
for a world of new relations and truths might 
at any time come to birth through the moral 
growth of man and a new mastery of nature 
granted by a Divine Will. When we look at 
life, existence, perception, in this light, we 
see that in the fact of personality perception 
and reality coincide. This is what we mean 
by personal realism. 6 

Perhaps the most serious objection to be 
raised against this conclusion will come from 
the realm of abnormal psychology. It will be 
held as an argument against the indivisibility 
of personality that there are abnormal instances 
of so-called dissociations of personality. In 
this case we should point to the necessity of 
carefully guarding our definitions. We need 
to distinguish between the dissociation of 

6 In speaking of the realism of thought, Hocking shows 
the necessity of changing "cogito ergo sum" to the simple 
*I am,' and contends for the reality of ideas, because my world, 
myself, and my ideas are constituent parts or phases of the 
same reality. (See Philosophical Review, 1910, pp. 316-317, 
article entitled "How Ideas Reach Reality.") 
208 



AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

psychic states which is possible, and of which 
we have numerous instances, and that impos- 
sibility which would be implied in the term 
dissociation of personality. Dissociation of 
personality would, if we use the term "per- 
sonality" in the present sense, mean the destruc- 
tion of personality. We feel that the strictly 
correct term to apply to this phenomenon of 
abnormal psychology is not dissociation of 
personality, but dissociation of conscious states. 
A victim of abnormal psychology does not con- 
sider himself two identities at the same moment, 
for purposes of willing, or creative causation. 
If one studies carefully the celebrated case of 
Miss Beauchamp, 7 one discovers that the 
source of her recovery was the existence of a 
self -identifying unit which survived the various 
moods and states under which she at times was 
held subject. A mood or a set of experiences 
might for a time occupy dominantly the land- 
scape of active consciousness, but above this 
was the still higher consciousness that she 
ought not to allow "Sally" or any other "self" 
to control her. Because she kept to this true 
identity, because her personality was funda- 
mentally indivisible, she was able in the end 
to command the moods that had held her and 

7 Compare Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Person- 
ality. 

209 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

recover the normal and rational consciousness 
of self. By keeping in mind the abiding element 
in self-consciousness we escape the impasse which 
these instances of the abnormal raise for any 
theory to which the relation rather than the 
relator is fundamental. The tendency to exag- 
gerate this theoretical dissociation is discussed 
by a modern psychologist 8 t in the following terms: 

The facts of multiple personality do strongly suggest 
a detached subconsciousness. Yet even here there is no 
such complete break as is popularly supposed. The sec- 
ondary personality depends upon and uses the mental 
acquisitions of the primary — uses its language, has its 
understanding of common sights and sounds, has its 
memories as its own. Hence even if the primary person- 
ality were totally unable to recall experiences of the sec- 
ondary, nevertheless the usual sort of psychic individuality 
is here in large measure. But inability to recall the sec- 
ondary has been exaggerated. There are apparently all 
degrees of memory lapse, not just one characteristic and 
complete sort. The popular notion that hypnotized sub- 
jects upon being wakened have no memory of what has 
occurred during hypnosis is erroneous. Sometimes there 
is full recall, sometimes partial recall, sometimes appar- 
ently complete amnesia. Even a subject who declares 
that he cannot recall anything is sometimes, at least, 
mistaken. The sundering, in short, is best interpreted 
as a phenomenon of attention and memory. It is a dis- 
sociated individual consciousness with which we are 
dealing, not two individual consciousnesses related by a 
subconscious bond." 



8 Coe, The Psychology of Religion, pp. 210, 211. 
210 



AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

If we apply Miss Beauchamp's case to the 
theory of neo-realism, each of the passing moods 
which ruled her experience must be held of 
equal reality and validity with her normal 
selfhood. In such a case an insane moment is 
charged with the same reality, with the same 
place and value with the sane. The whole 
system of ethical and moral values goes top- 
pling before the simple questions raised in 
abnormal psychology. It is the aim of personal 
realism to retain the unity which is the very 
essence of life, which springs from the indi- 
visibility of personality, and to keep it from 
vanishing in the abstract. 

(b) Personal Realism Aims an Advance Over 
Ordinary Forms of Personal Idealism. 

With personal idealism the self-conscious- 
ness is fundamental to all thinking. Any 
system which would explain the world without 
reference to the thinker upon whose symbols and 
terms knowledge depends would be considered 
by the idealist as unworthy of notice. To the 
personal idealist, any theory which would take 
account of the world of life and thought must 
keep in mind its supreme fact, the nature of 
personality itself. 

When personal idealism draws reality down 
out of the clouds of abstraction by insisting 
211 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

that ideas, perception, and logic derive their 
strength from a concrete existence in individual 
persons rather than from some vague generali- 
zation existing apart from life and experience, 
it does well. With this view personal realism 
is in entire agreement. 

Remembering the impossibility of marking 
an exact cleavage between individual adherents 
of the schools, the points of advance in general 
are these: personal realism adds to the thought 
of personality as fundamental to understanding 
the thought that it is fundamental to all being. 
It claims that the unity which exists in per- 
ception is due not only to the common origin 
of dual realms of reality but to a continually 
exercised and purposive intelligence which from 
moment to moment maintains all orders of 
reality. This supreme power is not assumed as 
an abstraction, unable to identify itself with the 
world of its creation, nor as an immanent power 
pantheistically working through atoms in such 
a way as to be involved in its own processes, 
but a person to whom the universe responds 
in a perfect and infinite way as it does in 
imperfect and finite measure to human per- 
sonality. 

The act of perception yields reality because 
in the moment of perceiving the personality 
experiences and relates. This experience and 
212 



AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

relation is indivisible, and in essence, unanalyza- 
ble, the very essence of life. Personality is 
something more than the source and ground of 
knowledge; it is the ground of being, and the 
primal source from which all things flow. 

The objection to the affirmation of personality 
in the World-Ground comes largely from the 
sense of limitation to which it seems to submit 
the supreme creative power. Yet this objection 
somewhat loses its force when we contemplate 
that any creative energy which is assumed as the 
source of life commits itself to the dictation of 
a world system, to a uniform succession of cause 
and effect, to a temporal and spatial order — 
becomes, in a sense, limited in its operation. 

It is no more limiting to think of personality 
in the Creative Being purposely lending himself 
to the working out of a world of human and 
physical relations than to think of an original 
creative impulse yielding itself to the rigorous 
limitations of physical law, or of a pantheistic 
creator shut up to the movement of molecular 
action. If the World-Ground be impersonal, 
it is impossible to explain the order of progress 
in evolution. Impersonalism on any plane, 
whether of materialism or idealism, yields 
equivalent results. One is stranded on the 
Scylla of mechanism or wrecked on the Charyb- 
dis of determinism. The highest creative en- 
213 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

ergy of which we could have any account, if 
either theory be assumed, would be that unique 
and self -creative power which is the limited pos- 
session of human personality and which molds 
a world of things to its own purposes. 

In the final analysis the sense of the limiting 
character of personality in a World-Ground will 
be seen to spring from the uncertain notions of 
time and space as they might affect such a being. 
Here lies the distinctive difference between 
divine and human personality. The one must 
be freed from the spatial and temporal order 
that it may fulfill the requirements of our 
thought; the other we think of as altogether the 
slave of time and space. The breach between 
the two seems impassable until we consider the 
relative nature of the temporal and spatial 
order. We discover a sense in which human 
personality, though working under the limita- 
tion of time and space, is able to transcend them. 
The abiding personality does not pass away 
with the order to which it is in such large 
measure subject. Its highest and most dis- 
tinctive victories are won in the very measure 
in which it is able to transcend time and space, 
to bring the distant into the plan of the present, 
and to insure the far-off harvests of its present 
will and action. So it will be seen that the 
perfection of personality might involve a 
214 



AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

complete transcendence of space and time, and 
personality thus transcendent would be freed 
from those limitations with which it is commonly 
thought connected. The essence of personality 
is neither time nor space, but creative activity. 
Creative activity in order to possess purpose, 
meaning, or to ground evolutionary progress, 
must possess the essential elements of person- 
ality. Thus personality takes on an inalienable 
metaphysical meaning. It is the only World- 
Ground, or creative energy, we can affirm 
without becoming lost in the agnostic mazes of 
the infinite regress, or in an immoral pantheism 
and determinism. It is the only basis on which 
we can maintain any order of freedom. 

Speaking in the language of the old realism 
of "things as they are," perception must be 
taken to include not a part but all of the factors. 
"Things as they are" must mean not only the 
things of the material world which can be acted 
upon. They must include the perceiving mind, 
and the self -identifying subject himself must be 
included as a part of realism. This offers the 
only way of escape from a static world. Because 
in our realism we include personality, a place is 
left for change and freedom. We need to dwell 
upon the meaning of this implication. The ex- 
perience of change is absolutely impossible to any 
consciousness, activity, or force which is unable 
215 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

to survive the change. Anything changing abso- 
lutely from moment to moment cannot keep any 
identity nor be aware of change. Neither could 
the onlooker be aware of change, for he would 
witness only an unceasing and unrelated crea- 
tion. Even the customary relation of cause 
and effect would be barred out. Any philoso- 
phy of change, then, that ignores the unchang- 
ing is contributing to its own destruction. 

The second consideration upon the implica- 
tions of which we should dwell is that, apart 
from personality, freedom in the creative energy 
or in the world is impossible. Much may be 
urged against the static systems of the past 
which with rigorous logic denied the existence 
of freedom, and bound the simplest acts of men 
to a materialistic mechanism, pretending to 
check up loves and hates, thought energy and 
purpose, by equivalents of food and drink. 
With all its impossibilities and lack of insight 
such a view possessed the virtue of consistency. 
But when we endeavor to get a world of freedom 
from an impersonal source, even the philosophic 
child should see that impersonal freedom, seeing 
neither before nor behind, conscious only of the 
present and having no conscious power of 
choice and no purpose, would be only an acci- 
dent. Such a world could have neither order 
nor meaning to a being like man, who has con- 
216 



AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

sciousness of purpose, choice, and freedom. So 
far as our realism is shot through with person- 
alism we are freed from the trammels of a static 
world. "Things as they are," including person- 
ality, provide for both freedom and change. 

(c) Personal Realism Aims through a Doctrine 
of Personality to Unite the Oppositions, 
Whatever one's philosophical opinions may 
be, there are but two attitudes which can be 
taken toward the perplexing problems of phi- 
losophy. One can decide to ignore altogether 
one side of the contradiction, or one can set out 
boldly to transcend the contradiction by seeking 
some higher basis where the apparent contra- 
dictions will appear as complementary parts of 
a higher unity. Both materialism and idealism 
present examples of the first attitude. Modern 
philosophy as a whole seeks the common ground 
of mediation. In the end, the contradiction 
between matter and spirit, cause and effect, 
thing and thought, comes to the metaphysical 
question of first cause. Here the ancient sys- 
tems lead us only to an ultimate mystery. Fol- 
lowing the way of materialism through the suc- 
cession of effects and causes, we assume at last 
a cause so abstract that it does not connect with 
the facts of life, or from sheer exhaustion we deny 
the possibility of knowledge. If we take the 
217 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

higher road of idealism, we again land in abstrac- 
tion, finding the swamps of phenomenalism little 
better than the quagmire of agnosticism. Be- 
cause of our naturalistic ways of thinking we 
continue to be perplexed by the demand for a 
creative energy which is itself uncaused. For 
the child of the Dragon's tooth uncaused 
cause is unthinkable, and he feels it better to 
die in the desert than in daring hope to go on 
toward a promised land. But the moment we 
look into the mystery of personality we dis- 
cover the groundlessness of certain fears, and 
are encouraged to believe that others may 
disappear under the light of larger knowledge. 
The reason for this hope is that we discover in 
our own exercised power of choice and purpose 
the very element which we considered unthink- 
able. We have within us the power of uncaused 
causation. We may choose to remove moun- 
tains and cast them into the depths of the sea, 
or we may choose to desist. In this primary 
act of choice we can locate nothing at all com- 
mensurate or equivalent to the effect produced. 
An impulse of personal ambition, a dream of the 
night, the scourging of the mind to inventive 
action by the sheer power of the willing person- 
ality changes the face of the earth and unlocks 
material laws and forces of which to that 
moment the scientist had been ignorant or 
218 



AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

skeptical. How much of the scientific stock 
in trade is the merest formula for getting at 
facts rather than a fundamental metaphysical 
condition of things is shown with great clearness 
and cogency by Bergson in discussing the 
scientific overestimate of the doctrine of the 
conservation of energy. 9 If from the fulcrum 
of a limited contact such as the human body 
gives to the human spirit personality can create 
its own internal powers and then turn them to 
the mastery of its world, why should it seem 
incredible as the attribute of a Supreme Creative 
Person? The reason for our blindness at this 
point has been perhaps our insistence upon the 
existence of matter first, and then upon spirit 
as secondary. But science shows us spirit or 
life in the very act of creating the material 
fulcrum from which it enlarges its powers and 
contacts. Whatever of truth there be in evo- 
lution is in this power of life to lay hold upon 
matter and to bend it to new purposes. In 
other words, the purpose, desire, or will is able 
measurably to create the organs through which 
life functions. Organism may be looked upon 
as constructing itself by functioning, so that 
structure cannot be said to precede life. The 
individual creates the structure by functioning. 10 

9 Time and Free Will. pp. 150f. 

10 Compare C. M. Child, Individuality in Organism, pp. 16f . 

219 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

The story of progressing life is the story of 
uncaused cause, and its opposite is death. In 
personality, then, we find the key to metaphy- 
sics, a doctrine surely as old as Augustine, but 
too much neglected by an age to which the great 
appeal has been one-sidedly naturalistic. 

The objection may be made that we lock our 
problem up in the mysterious deeps of person- 
ality which, in the nature of the case, is unana- 
lyzable and indivisible. If such an objection 
be raised, we are not without certain consola- 
tions. The objection is not so serious as it 
seems, for it amounts simply to this, that life 
is greater than any explanation of it. Our best 
symbols fail to grasp its essence, just as the 
fact of a falling body is something more than 
the equation in which physics represents it. 
If the inadequacy of language continues to 
dull our joy or to prevent "a shining morning 
face," we may benefit by the reflection that 
though we cannot adequately describe person- 
ality and life, we can experience it, which is 
better. As for the objection that personality 
itself is a mystery, we can be comforted with the 
thought that since we must rest upon mystery 
in any case, the mystery of personality may 
possess some superiority to the mysteries pre- 
sented in the fundamental reality by materialism 
and idealism. Some mysteries assumed at 



AIM AND METHOD OF REALISM 

least do not continue to raise difficulties ad 
infinitum and with such persistent frequency 
as to raise the query in honest minds whether the 
system has not left the rails of consistency to 
bump along on the cross-ties of facts with which 
it is in disagreement. Thoughts will come that 
the consequent bumping springs from going in 
a direction at right angles with the facts. If 
one is to be thrust on mystery anyway, it seems 
well to choose the mystery least incongruous 
with the facts of experience, and giving greatest 
hope of future elucidation. Our choice lies 
between an incoherent purposeless accident, 
demanding an infinite regress, and therefore 
unknowable, or an inaccessible pantheistic 
cause wherein matter is wholly phenomenal; 
or we may choose a self -creative personality as 
the ground of being, sustaining itself according 
to general uniformities discoverable in limited 
and partial ways within ourselves. If we 
choose personality as the ultimate mystery, 
there is hope that we may discover some things 
about it now, and there is a yet higher hope of 
that which may be revealed by its own self- 
mastery as it mounts to the freedom of the sons 
of God, when, released from limitations of the 
spatial and temporal order, it knows no longer 
in part nor after a given order of succession, but 
as it also is known. This investigation and this 
221 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

hope we cannot entertain if the fundamental 
mystery lies in an invisible seon or in the ineffable 
Absolute. If personality be the supreme mys- 
tery, as it is already the undying interest of 
life, we have something sufficiently concrete to 
be studied in its laws and manifestations. 
Though it be a great mystery and we grow 
impatient with the inadequacy of the solutions 
offered, we have something which we can at 
least experience, instead of a mystery whose 
doors are forever locked and barred with the 
sign of unreality which reads, "Unknowable," 
or "Absolute." 



222 



CHAPTER IX 
THE DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY 

It may be desirable before precipitating a 

discussion of the meaning of personality to 

indicate in a prefatory way the line of the 
discussion. 

The Meaning of Personality in a System 
of Personal Realism 
It is only fair to state at the beginning that the 
position which a doctrine of personal realism 
will take must be that personality is the fun- 
damental and indivisible unit of reality. We 
shall assume that it is something more than 
states of consciousness, which apart from the 
abiding nature of personality would be but 
disconnected flashes of intelligence. As an 
attempt to reach the realities of life these 
flashes of consciousness by themselves alone 
would be more confusing than the intermittent 
glare of lightning to the eyes of the belated 
traveler on a trackless moor. If personality is 
that which can be divided up into passing 
"states"; if it can be adequately defined or 
understood by naming the results of its activity, 
as "sensibility," "willing," etc., then it is the 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

prey of each passing "state," and there can be 
neither freedom nor choice. Personality is 
likewise more than a combination of any 
number of "states" that might be taken as com- 
posing it. If personality is constituted by a 
federation of states, it becomes less than they, 
and there can be no such thing as purposive 
and efficient causation. 

Neither does the personal realist when he 
uses the term "personality" mean to refer to the 
brain as the seat of the independent, self- 
existing soul, nor to the mind as conscious merely 
of its own organic activity. In the words of 
one writer, personality "is nothing other than 
the permanence of the active principle which 
constitutes us." 1 

This idea is not novel in the history of philo- 
sophy, nor is it out of keeping with modern 
tendencies in widely divergent systems. 

Applying this fact to neo-realism, it would 
seem possible to recognize the personal element 
in consciousness, for we find Perry seemingly 
admitting that "the so-called" relational theory 
of consciousness "has emphasized this fact that 
mental content is distinguished, not by the stuff 
or elements of which it is composed but by the 



1 Piat, La Personne Humaine, p. 69. In this connection 
and also on page 28 and elsewhere Piat discusses this general 
problem in an interesting way. 



DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY 

way in which these elements are composed." 2 
Such an admission makes clear that it is not 
less the mental content than the willing person- 
ality that determines the mental possession. 
The way in which the elements of mental con- 
sciousness are composed makes the part of the 
composer a most important one. This is our 
old friend personality, brought into the field 
again though thinly disguised by an alias. The 
neo-realist claim for the immediacy of per- 
ception, that is, the impossibility of representing 
perception by analysis into subject and object, 
and the contrasting forms of mind and matter, 
is paralleled in personal realism by the claim 
that it is personality which defies analysis. 
When one has analyzed it into functions and 
states and laid the contrast between one and 
the other he has really missed its reality. The 
reason for this is plain. It is the profound truth 
which Bergson sets forth in his contrast between 
intuition and intelligence, or rationalization, as 
a means to knowledge. Words can never 
adequately describe the fact of life. 

Some Essential Features of Personality 

(a) Self-Definition and Recognition of Other Per- 
sonalities. 
The first essential to be named in personality 

2 Compare Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 277. 
225 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

is the self-defining element of self-identity. In 
the discovery of its differentiation from sur- 
rounding objects comes the dawning of person- 
ality. Whatever else personality may mean, 
it must mean this — that some unit of feeling 
becomes self-conscious through its reactions. 
The immediate corollary of this truth is the 
existence of other objects and the recognition 
of other personalities. 

Bertrand Russell lends an interest to the 
present discussion when, speaking of the inde- 
finability of wholes, 3 he declares that a unity 
cannot be broken up into its terms except for 
purposes of analysis. It is obvious upon re- 
flection that personal identity is of quite 
another order than mathematical identity. 

I am not the same to-day that I was yesterday, 
for, under the impact of experience and life, I 
possess different qualities of mind and spirit, 
new attitudes and moods toward life. I have 
changed, and yet I have maintained my iden- 
tity. This would have been impossible in the 
rigid realm of mathematics and of logic, for here 
the entering in of new qualities into the defined 
whole 4 would mean the passing of the old and 
the arrival at a new identity. The difference 

8 Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, pp. 

II If. 

4 Ibid., pp. 96f. 

226 



DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY 

then between identity in numbers or in material 
objects of any kind and identity in finite persons 
is one of relation to the temporal order. The 
person survives the time order as does nothing 
else. The opposing thought which at once 
arises to the mind is the remembrance of the 
duration of material objects around us. Not 
only do animals seem to possess the same element 
of duration over time, holding for long periods 
a certain identity, but we seem able also to affirm 
such enduring identity of trees, houses, moun- 
tains, and other natural objects. A little con- 
sideration, however, discloses in such claims a 
largely subjective element. Such identity could 
be really true only as the product of thinking 
intelligence, on the part of the perceiver, or to 
some supreme intelligence to whom the duration 
of things possessed a meaning, or as trees, 
mountains, and animals were themselves con- 
scious of time. 

Personality as the differentiation of self- 
consciousness from external objects is plain 
enough; as including a world of other person- 
alities it is not so clear. Nevertheless, we can- 
not pass over the part played in personality by 
the existence of the social relation. If there 
were no other personalities, human or divine, 
the whole problem of explanation would break 
down. A solipsistic world could not find nor 
227 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

would it need explanation. All could be taken 
as a unity of experience, a part of the individual. 
The perception theory cf neo-realism would 
hold for such a world as well as any. If the 
recognition of other personalities were not 
demanded, abstract idealism would do as well, 
for this personal world is exactly what neither 
of the parties can provide for. Any creative 
being which is Absolute or pantheistic must be 
impersonal. A philosophy of the Absolute 
would quickly come to an end if it did not 
unconsciously assume personality in an Absolute 
which is by definition incapable of it. We can 
make no progress in the definition of personality 
unless, first of all, we describe it as self-defining, 
differentiating itself from all other selves and 
objects. This characteristic is as necessary to 
the affirmation of divine personality as it is to 
the human. This element will be treated in a 
later chapter. 

That the recognition of other personalities is 
necessary to a definition of personality is clear 
when we come to consider the possibility of 
common ideas which ground the world of rela- 
tion. We approximate each other's thought not 
only by reason of similarity of mental function, 
not only because the material world is what it is, 
with but one story to tell to all, but more than 
all else because the world of matter and intelli- 



DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY 

gence is maintained and upheld by a personal 
World-Ground. In no other way is it possible 
to account for a common order of intelligence. 
There is no other way to meet the problems 
thrust upon us by any realistic attempt to 
define the relation of mind to other minds and to 
the world. We turn to Perry for illustration. 5 
How can we come to a common possession of 
ideas? The element of personality so tinges 
all ideas that I cannot be certain that my friend 
gets my exact meaning. Into his notion enter 
the elements of his own experience, rendering 
his thought more or less different from mine. 
We can come only to a reasonable degree of 
coincidence of ideas. Here the realistic diffi- 
culty comes from distinguishing mind as a 
bundle of nervous reactions, distinct from my 
"me" or personality. It is the fallacy of analy- 
sis applied to personality, and corresponds to 
the idealistic fallacy which by analysis breaks 
up reality into subject and object in perception. 
What are we perceiving when we perceive 
the mind of another? Have we not merely 
changed our self-conscious introspection for 
another's, put into the inadequate form of such 
human expression, verbal or otherwise, as we are 
able to command? However realistic I may 
be, I cannot be sure, from the realistic stand- 

6 Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 288 et passim. 
229 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

point even, that his nervous reactions called 
thought have equivalence to mine, nor can I 
look into his brain and see his ideas. You tell 
me of your visit to London, 6 but my ideas (on 
the realistic basis) will scarcely correspond to 
yours if the only aggregation of houses I have 
ever seen is that at Hickory Corners. My 
interpretation of your ideas will depend about 
as much upon my personal mental content as 
upon your description. The more nearly our 
experiences agree, the more nearly will our 
ideas approximate. 

(b) Duration. 

Any definition of personality would be incom- 
plete which did not recognize duration as an 
essential element. We here use the term in the 
Bergsonian sense. This follows closely on the 
assertion of self -identity. As we saw above, 
personal self-identity has a meaning quite 
different from that which holds in the world 
of matter, or mathematics or logic. In the 
realm of personality we -have an identity sur- 
viving change and not altogether subject to the 
temporal order. The temporal order influences 
it profoundly but does not conquer it. The 
personality brings its past with it at every 
moment; it relates that past to the present 

6 Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 296. 
230 



DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY 

moment, and both to a possible future, thus 
transcending and outstripping the temporal 
order. Its power to do this differentiates per- 
sonality forever from the world about it. Per- 
sonality alone gathers and masters an accumu- 
lating experience. 7 Fite likewise calls atten- 
tion to the truth that human consciousness or 
personality is an indefinitely graduated scale 
of being. It is only when our action springs 
out of a consideration of the whole of life's 
interest that we can be said to be fully con- 
scious. The creature of mere habit then, can 
be said scarcely to have lived at all. 8 

(c) Freedom. 

The possession by personality of duration is 
necessary if we are to have the further essential 
qualities of freedom. Only that being who 
is in possession of past, present, and future can 
be capable of any free act of choice or purpose, 
or can be charged with any duty of moral 
responsibility. To deny freedom in person- 
ality is to remove at a stroke its chief glory, 
moral and spiritual accountability. 

(d) Causality 

But the unique element of personality is the 
power of purposive, efficient causation. Using 

7 Compare Haldane, Mechanism, Life and Personality, pp. 
114-5. 

8 Fite, Individualism, pp. 66-67. 

231 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

its power of choice, it can bring to pass that 
which is physically undetermined. It can so 
bring under subjection its own mental powers 
and processes as to create for itself new powers 
of expression. Thus transcending itself, it takes 
flight to new discoveries, and moves to new 
masteries of the physical world. 

Bergson in a beautiful passage has noted this 
unique element in personality. He says: 

The finished portrait is explained by the features of 
the model, by the nature of the artist, by the colors spread 
out on the palette; but, even with the knowledge of what 
explains it, no one, not even the artist, could have fore- 
seen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it 
would have been to produce it before it was produced, an 
absurd hypothesis which is its own refutation. Even so 
with regard to the moments of our life, of which we are the 
artisans. Each of them is a kind of creation. And just 
as the talent of the painter is formed or deformed — in 
any case, is modified — under the very influence of the 
works he produces, so each of our states at the moment 
of its issue modifies our personality, being, indeed, the 
new form that we are just assuming. It is, then, right to 
say that what we do depends on what we are; but it is 
necessary to add also that we are, to a certain extent, 
what we do, and that we are creating ourselves continu- 
ally. This creation of self by self is the more complete 
the more one reasons on what one does .... We find that 
for a conscious being to exist is to change, to change is to 
mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. 
Should the same be said of existence in general? 9 

9 Creative Evolution, pp. 6-7. 



DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY 

We feel that Bergson should have gone on to 
make the affirmation of efficient causality in 
general, for wherever we discover any unique- 
ness in the process, the emergence of new and 
materially uncaused elements, any evolutionary 
progress, the element of personal causation is a 
factor. The only efficient and unique causa- 
tion of which we have any knowledge is personal. 

So when he says, "The evolution of life really 
continues, as we have shown, an initial impul- 
sion," 10 it is possible the initial impulsion of which 
he speaks, in so far as it is now efficient above 
the passage of time, is but a manifestation of 
that willing efficiency which, so far as man can 
rightly judge, is the unique characteristic of a 
person, in this case, of course, a Supreme Person. 
It is not strange that man, finding himself 
possessor of such uniqueness of causal efficiency, 
should refer it to a power outside himself. 

Investigation discloses that all evolutionary 
progress of which we can really find illustration 
or take account is personal. At this point we 
should keep scientific analogy close to the limits 
of experience. If science had always done this, 
she would not have cast upon the world so many 
groundless metaphysical conclusions. It may 
be thrilling to draw the ideal of evolutionary 
progress so that by a system of abstraction 

J° Ibid., p. 246. 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

which accounts for nothing we seem to have 
explained the heavens above and the earth 
beneath, and the waters under the earth. But 
science needs at this point some of the soberness 
of judgment that she urges upon enthusiastic 
theists. So far as we know, intellectual devel- 
opment comes actually through the purposive 
will of the subject. Animal strains are im- 
proved not usually by fortuitous accident but by 
purposive breeding. New fruits do not spring 
forth haphazard, but a Burbank perfects them 
into being as the result of purposive and inten- 
sive willing. The science of eugenics seeks to 
apply this law of personal purpose in evolution 
to the well-being of society. Wherever in this 
day we can lay our finger upon any orderly or 
continuous progress or evolution we shall find be- 
hind it, if we look, a self -identifying and intelli- 
gent purpose. An unintelligent evolution would 
be an unintelligible one. Progress, being read 
only in the light of intelligence, demands an 
intelligent source. Efficient causation, then, 
so far as we have any data by which to go, is 
the unique possession of personality in time, 
and it would not seem too much to assume that 
it is the possession of personality anywhere. 
How this can be may appear a very great 
mystery, but we cannot deny the element of 
efficient causation in ourselves without denying 
234 



DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY 

the world of intelligence and moral responsi- 
bility. 

So also with every new idea, with every product of 
inspiration: those to whom at first and rarely such 
inbursts of reflexive insight come with definiteness and 
power could not have done otherwise than refer them to a 
supernatural source. Moments of deep thought and inten- 
ser fancy, distinguished above the commonplace of exist- 
ence, moments of imagination and invention — these 
moments have in all ages struck upon the mind as from a 
world beyond that of the visible career. 11 

Is this more than a recognition of the fact 
that unique causation, when it appears, is 
spontaneously viewed as the product of per- 
sonality? 

As an uncaused and efficient cause, the finite 
personality is limited to a world of relation. 
The Infinite or Supreme Personality would 
be limited only by his moral desire. 

All of these definitions gathered up into that 
strange reflective self-possession which achieves 
is what we mean by personality. 

In the words of Herder's "Self": 

"Not what thou seest (animals observe); 
Not what thou hearest (brutes can likewise hear) ; 
Not what thou learnest (ravens also learn); 
But what, perceiving, thou dost understand; 
The power that in thee works, the inner seer 



11 Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 9. 
235 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Who from the past divineth what shall be; 
The organizer who from chaos spins 
The pattern of the raveling universe 
Into the tapestries of mind and sense. 
This art thou, even as 'tis likewise God." 1 "- 

The Self-Conscious and Self-Creative 
Elements in Personality 

At least two other elements must be intro- 
duced into any adequate definition of person- 
ality. These are self -consciousness and self- 
creativity, and they are applicable alone to 
human personality and by analogy to the 
Supreme Personality. By self-consciousness 
now we mean something more than self -identi- 
fication and separation from other individuals. 
The lower form of self -consciousness is in some 
measure the possession of animals. The self- 
consciousness of the person is of a higher order, 
for man is not only self-conscious. He is con- 
scious of his states of consciousness. He not 
only acts from motives, but he is able also to 
weigh and judge those motives, approving or 
condemning them. And this power does not 
wait upon the passage of time. It is not 
dependent upon memory, for it is possible for 
man to judge of his states of consciousness in 
the very moment of action. This power of 
the personality brings moral responsibility in 

12 Trans, by C. A. Lane, Monist, 1911, p. 105. 



DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY 

its train, enters intimately into his possession 
of freedom, and endows all the other qualities of 
individuality with a new meaning and signifi- 
cance. Thus endowed with the possibility of 
free moral choices, he needs only to be empow- 
ered with the further unique gift of self-crea- 
tivity. 

This self -creative power is peculiar to person- 
ality. The appearance of the new in intel- 
lectual grasp, in knowledge, in insight, in reve- 
lation of unusual truths, or in unique expressions 
of truth, the genius of Beethoven, the insight 
of Shakespeare, the moral and spiritual suprem- 
acy of Jesus — these are but parts of the self- 
creative mystery of personality. They are 
parts of the Ultimate Mystery, but they are 
no harder of solution than the mystery that 
gathers about Bergson's vital "elan," or any 
other impersonal explanation of first cause. 
In personality we have a first cause of whose 
operation we are conscious, even though we 
are unable to define or analyze it. It may be 
the part of sense and sound judgment to con- 
clude to the personality of the ultimate self- 
creative First Cause. We do this because the 
only appearance of self -creative energy we can 
know is inextricably bound up with personality. 
At any rate this conclusion cannot be less 
scientific than one which drives the question 
237 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

back into an atomistic or ideal realm where 
we are forbidden ever to observe it. The only 
example of purposive, self-creative activity of 
which we cannot escape the knowledge is in the 
human personality itself. 

Personality the Fundamental Reality 

Haldane, quoting Hegel, 13 calls attention to 
the fact, that Kant's categories can be com- 
pleted only by adding the category of life to that 
of substance as one of the fundamental or 
initial ideas, and declares that this would end 
the difficulties of the mechanistic theory of life. 
He likewise adds in another place, "Philosophy 
leads us up to personality as the great central 
fact of the universe." 14 We would add that 
personality is the fundamentally real. We have 
noticed the self-identifying, other-identifying 
quality of personality, its enriching content of 
experience in the survival of time, its freedom 
in choice and purpose, making place for moral 
responsibility, its unique power of uncaused 
causation, its conscious self-consciousness and 
its self-creativity, but even the completest 
analysis of function and activity are no more 
it than the description of a horse is a horse. 
Primarily, each of these functions pivots upon 



13 Mechanism, Life and Personality, p. 76. 
" Ibid., p. 133. 



DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY 

the self -identifying unit of being which in itself 
is not subject to change. This unchanging 
factor is primary and real. It is given in the 
simplest perception, and is not dependent upon 
intellectualization. It is the ultimate content 
of consciousness. It is simpler than "I think, 
therefore I am"; it is prior to "I perceive, 
therefore I am," for the moment the fact has 
passed into syllogism it has passed out of life 
into symbol. Differing from the starting-point 
of idealism, it avoids ascribing a transcendental 
nature to reality. Personality is the reality, 
and the system which sets it forth might well be 
called either personalism or personal realism. 



CHAPTER X 

PERSONAL REALISM AND THE 
TROUBLESOME PROBLEMS OF 
PHILOSOPHY 

Though much of the ground has already been 
covered, it may not be unprofitable to gather 
up in summary the relation which a personal 
realism must bear to the ever-recurring problems 
of philosophy. These problems are such as 
causation, space and time, the dualism of 
thought and thing, and the problems of error 
and evil. It is the more necessary to make this 
relation unmistakable, for the reason that the 
whole system, as, indeed, all systems of thought, 
must be ultimately judged upon these grounds. 
If a system of personal realism is to stand, it 
must prove its practical worth in the way it 
answers the troublesome problems of philos- 
ophy. 

The Question of Causal Explanation 
Let us consider what personal realism may 

have to offer in the matter of causal explanation. 

The impasse of mechanical causation often has 
240 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

been shown in philosophical discussion. It 
seems hardly necessary to call attention to the 
fact of the inadequacy of any causal explanation 
which depends merely upon succession in 
events. 1 In such a case there could be no first 
cause, and any cause must be assumed to con- 
tain within it all effects. Such a scheme comes 
little short of the static universe of the Eleatics, 
as it affords no opportunity for innovation or 
freedom. Moreover, it makes insoluble the 
problem of progress. Evolution becomes an 
unthinkable and irrational conception along 
lines of impersonal causation. The vital neces- 
sity for all evolution is the introduction into 
the effect of that which does not appear in the 
cause; this new element is that which consti- 
tutes the progress. If we attempt to explain 
the effect by the cause in any impersonal way, 
then all elements in the effect must be traced 
in the mechanical cause, and we have not 
progress but a state of rest. Cause and effect 
are on such a basis identical. Evolution is the 
differentiation of one event from another in the 
order of succession. This differentiation, and 
not the order of succession, is the problem. 
The question arises whether we ever do expe- 
rience such differentiation by the appearance 

1 For a clear discussion of this matter compare article by 
J. S. MacKenzie, in Mind, 1912, pp. 339ff. 
241 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

in the effect of elements that have no apparent 
physical source. Do we have any experience 
of self -creativity? Bergson says we do, and 
that this self -creativity is the "vital elan," the 
essence of life and reality. But "vital elan" 
is a term as abstract as "fountain of perpetual 
youth," and as hard to locate. We cannot 
trace it to a concrete instance. It is said to be 
everywhere, but it is also undefinable. 

At this point the personal realist calls atten- 
tion to the self -creative energy which we do not 
imagine, but experience and of which each of 
us is conscious. This is the element which Kant, 
who had declared against self-creativity, had 
to acknowledge in order to retain the reality of 
moral responsibility. This self-creativity lies 
in the free choice and purpose of the individual 
person. In personal causation the ultimate ex- 
planation is not adequately provided by any 
mechanical assumption whatever. The ass that 
starved midway between two haystacks because 
the external impulses were exactly equal and op- 
posite in direction, never existed outside the 
speculations of the closet philosophers. The 
deciding factor is not external but internal. 

If the human will is but the prey of external 
impulses, all personal responsibility for action 
has gone to the winds. There are philosophers 
who consider the question of moral responsi- 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

bility to lie outside the realm of philosophy. 
But the moral elements in man are quite as 
important as the intellectual, and any philoso- 
phy which renders that realm unreal must 
eventually be discarded as inadequate and 
unsatisfying, because it is at war with the facts 
of personality. 

The ultimate explanation in personal causa- 
tion comes back in every case to individual 
purpose or will. This uncaused purpose brings 
in the element of novelty between cause and 
effect which spells advance. If this be true in 
the case of human causation, it becomes 
plausible at least that the evolution which we 
witness in the world around us is to find its 
ultimate explanation in the purpose and will of 
a supreme personality. 

While we may be reluctant to admit so much, 
it is clear that on the impersonal or mechanical 
plane of explanation, the grounding of any 
efficient evolution is impossible. As Bergson 
has pointed out, 2 such cutting of reality into 
little bits like a puzzle picture, in order to reas- 
semble them and attain an imaginary progress, 
is without value as a means of metaphysical 
explanation. 

The explanation of causation by purpose will 
seem inadequate to many, because in science, 

2 Creative Evolution, p. xiiif. 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

for purposes of clearness, certain symbols must 
necessarily be used, and these symbols seem 
important in the explanation. Here science 
has been hard pressed to give any satisfying 
definition of its terms, or any very intelligible 
and tangible proofs of its affirmations. It has 
been driven by the necessities of explanation 
from the cruder forms of atomism through a 
whole series of symbols, such as monads, seons, 
electrons, etc., invisible and indefinable, but 
sufficient upon which to hang figures of speech, 
such as vortices, repulsions and attractions, and 
electrical action. The use of these figures is 
necessary to science, and any symbol which 
serves to meet the requirements of description 
of observed action is equally valuable. The 
trouble comes when the figures or symbols are 
assumed as the basis of reality, and that there 
is no other. 

It seems impossible in the midst of the preva- 
lent scientific mood of the age for the philos- 
opher to brave the storm of scientific scorn in 
order to affirm the figurative and symbolic 
nature of these scientific assumptions. But if 
one thing more than another is clear to the 
philosophic mind, it is the purely hypothetical 
nature of these assumptions regarding the nature 
of reality. Their real value lies in their dis- 
closure of the laws and uniformities of nature. 
244 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

They are valid according to their utility, but 
they leave the metaphysical question of reality 
and causation just where they found it. This 
need cause no trouble nor embarrassment so 
long as the limits of empirical explanation are 
realized. It is only when the scientist attempts 
to draw metaphysical conclusions that he passes 
from the realm of reality into that of conjecture 
where he lives no privileged existence, but must 
submit to metaphysical rather than to scientific 
tests. 

As an illustration let us consider the attempt 
to explain qualitative value by quantitative 
changes. 3 As different rates of vibration in 
wave-lengths give us the scale in music and the 
various colors of the spectrum in light, so it is 
conceived that the only difference between 
sound and color is a difference in intensity of 
vibration, in the cosmic substance. On this 
supposition it is possible to build a complete 
system. The whole world of hearing, taste, 
feeling, seeing, subjective and objective, is 
reduced in imagination to a system of vibrations 
more or less intense. We have not referred to 
the scheme in order to ridicule it. All this might 
in time be scientifically elucidated and yet fall 
short of metaphysical explanation. One need 
have no quarrel with such a system if it holds 

3 Matter and Memory, pp. 270ff. 
245 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

to the limits of its possibilities, and submits 
itself to the facts whose explanation is desired. 
If it is proved that all qualitative differences 
can be reduced to quantitative changes, we are 
still sobered by the fact that we continue to 
bear an undiminished burden of metaphysical 
and epistemological explanation. The question 
to be answered is as difficult after the admis- 
sion as before, for now we must show why, 
instead of a quantitative consciousness of vibra- 
tions, we have consciousness of pitch, timbre, 
music, or noise, raising within our personalities 
the surging tides of hope and action, speaking 
to aesthetic and moral impulses, or creating 
within us a vast despair. Why is difference in 
quantity in vibration interpreted by us as a 
difference between sound and light? Why do I 
distinguish a certain speed as the moaning voice 
of the sea and another as the glory of the 
mountains? Whatever scientific progress has 
been made by the assumption — and it is not 
necessary to contradict the possibility — it will 
be clearly seen that the whole personal world 
which is of value and interest to man is yet to 
explain. A world of love and hate, of heroism 
and treachery, of selfishness and sacrifice — this 
is the great mystery and miracle. Why do mere 
vibrations, differing in intensity, bear so large a 
tale of meaning? It is obvious that the asser- 
246 






PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

tion that qualitative differences may in some 
scientific scheme be reduced to quantitative, 
however true for science, is a begging of the 
metaphysical question. Having made the affir- 
mation, the problem is still to be answered. 
Why do quantitative facts represent qualitative 
meanings? The qualitative meanings are the 
ones that carry the major interest. 

Space and Time 

With regard to space and time, which have 
already received consideration, it will be neces- 
sary here only to indicate the point in which 
personal realism would place peculiar emphasis, 
the relation of personality to the spatial and 
temporal order. 

First would be the relative character of the 
spatial and temporal order, space and time being 
the categories under which the individual 
relates things and events to himself and to each 
other. It adds to the Kantian dictum the 
affirmation that the temporal and spatial rela- 
tions are saved from the solipsistic judgment by 
being part of a temporal and spatial order 
maintained by a Supreme Personal Intelligence. 
This addition may seem to some to complicate 
the problem. But its metaphysical results are 
better, and in the end less confusing, than the 
erection of space and time into an independent 
247 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

order. This last inevitably lands in dualism, 
or makes the temporal and spatial categories 
wholly subjective and their universal nature 
inexplicable. Personal realism places distinct 
emphasis upon the nonspatial, nontemporal 
elements in personality. This enables it to 
meet the objection raised against making the 
spatial and temporal gain universal validity 
through dependence upon a spaceless and time- 
less Supreme Personality. It is just the space- 
less and timeless elements that are the dis- 
tinguishing features of human personality. 
Because personality can make the spatial dif- 
ferentiation between the here and the there, 
between the me and the not-me, it becomes self- 
defining and self-conscious. It could not make 
this differentiation were it not in some way 
transcendent over space. It is not confined to 
the spot on the earth where it rests nor to the 
limits of seeing, hearing, or feeling. 

In a similar way there is a real sense in which 
the human personality is timeless. Its tran- 
scendence of time is that which helps to give it a 
unique character in the universe. It brings its 
past experience with it into the present timeless 
moment, and looking out into the future 
transcends time by active willing, purposing, 
and causing. It works according to the tem- 
poral order, but it is superior to it. It is this 
248 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

timeless and spaceless element in personality 
to which Bergson refers when he declares: 
"Perception is master of space in the exact 
measure in which action is master of time." 4 
It is this transcendence of space and time which 
gives a hint for the solution of the relation of a 
spaceless and timeless supreme Personality to 
the spatial and temporal order. 

A further fact needs to be mentioned before 
we close the discussion. However arbitrarily 
the spatial and temporal order may affect the 
physical side of a man, it does not touch the 
inner springs of personality. In the course of a 
long life the physical elements of the body are 
renewed many times. Physical changes take 
place which cause a man to be unrecognized 
by his friends and which astonish him with 
differences marked by the years. So far as 
physical appearance is concerned it is difficult for 
him to recognize the little boy in the grown 
man. It is possible for him to make the dis- 
tinction of the poet who sings : 



"Across the fields of yesterday- 
He sometimes comes to me, 

A little lad just back from play- 
The lad I used to be. 



4 Matter and Memory, p. 23. 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

"And yet he smiles so wistfully 

Once he has crept within, 
I wonder if he hopes to see 

The man I might have been." 6 

On the side of personality, however, there is 
neither doubt nor question, nor discontinuity 
in the recognition of one's individual identity. 
One knows himself past all the changes, as 
identical with that personality that walked with 
confiding hand in the hand of his father or laid 
his head to rest upon a mother's breast. This 
strange power of self -identification is the essence 
of personality. Time and space are the canvas 
on which it relates its experiences, but neither 
has power to make inroads into it. This is the 
surest element in human knowledge, without 
which the world, so far as the individual is 
concerned, spins away into chaos. One may 
doubt the reality of the world around him, or 
the reality of other persons, but to doubt himself 
would mean either insanity or idiocy. 

The Dualism of Thought and Thing 
One fact is made apparent by the clearing 
process in philosophy, which is that the dualism 
between subject and object, thought and thing, 
never can be solved by ignoring either element 
of the problem. It is useless, on the one hand, 

6 Thomas S. Jones, Jr., in The Rose Jar, Thomas B. Mosher, 
Publisher. 

25Q 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

to deny to the mind any reality beyond that 
contributed by the world of matter, or to 
attempt reducing thought to physical movement 
or cellular readjustment in the brain. Nor, on 
the other hand, is the result more happy, if, 
affirming the reality of thought, we banish the 
material world to an unreality of phantom and 
of shade, the product of finite thought, having 
no reality outside the mind. The question then 
arises as to how, if we are to maintain two orders 
of reality, it is possible to so relate them as 
to secure identity and continuity of meaning. 
This has become the problem of modern phi- 
losophy. 

In the past the problem has been met by an 
abstraction, and the old temptation remains. 
This fact finds illustration in that school of neo- 
realism which considers the fundamental reality 
to be not the thinker nor the thing but the rela- 
tion between them. In this system the rela- 
tion is the fundamental reality. If this be true, 
then the act of perception is indivisible, really 
unanalyzable. This realistic unity seems to us 
artificial rather than natural. It is a unity 
that we have to make in our thought. We 
have to force our minds either to leave out that 
which seems natural to perception or to think as 
indivisible that which in simple perception is 
ever divided. The old realism had less of 
251 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

strain put upon it when it declared for things 
as they appear. It was comparatively easy 
for the unenlightened to believe in the funda- 
mental reality of material objects. One could 
easily believe in the reality of his personality, 
though one's attention was not so easily fixed 
upon the inner processes. But to believe that 
the reality is outside both of the personality 
and the natural object is as much of a strain 
upon credulity as the assumptions of abstract 
idealism. One is so close to one's mind that the 
unreflective man is not aware of its presence 
any more than the healthy man is aware of his 
stomach. To such a man food is more import- 
ant than physiology. So the crude realist had 
a certain consistency of thought. He was con- 
scious of material objects — nothing could be 
surer. Neo-realism is of quite another order. 
It has lost much of the naive common sense of 
the earlier doctrine. This is not the result of 
realism, but, rather, of reflection that has com- 
pelled it to vacate realism of the older type. 
Subjective idealism is not a more abstract con- 
ception than this of reality consisting of relation. 
I have not mentioned this lapse from the older 
realism of common sense in order to condemn 
it. The departure from original simplicity may 
be a philosophical advance and should be con- 
sidered on its own merits. This fact is men- 
252 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

tioned in order to point out that neo-realism 
is nearer to idealism in its essential features 
than is commonly supposed. 

Relation is an abstract term, and to name it 
as the ultimate reality is akin to naming the 
Absolute as the ultimate reality. 

How, then, does personal realism attempt 
the compromise between the ancient views? 
The answer is that the fundamental reality is 
not in the relation but in the relator. We have 
the individual relating the world of things to 
himself, and this is possible because the world 
of things and persons are mutually related by a 
supreme Intelligence. What is, then, the real? 
The reality is persons in a personal world. 

If it seems we have thus reintroduced abstrac- 
tion under the term "personality/ ' a little 
consideration may soften the harshness of the 
judgment. The first of these considerations 
is that there is even to the ordinary mind no 
incompatibility in the assertion of the essential 
unity of the personality in perception. Unity 
at this point is the sine qua non of perception. 
One does not perceive with a divided personal- 
ity. The observer has no doubt of the world of 
appearances, and this world must possess as its 
fundamental characteristic intelligibility, else 
it cannot be understood. If, now, both thinker 
and thing can be considered as arising from a 
253 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

common Intelligence and Purpose, we have a 
sufficient Ground for unity — a Ground which 
needs no further explanation. 

A second consideration is this : though person- 
ality may be an inexplicable mystery, it is at 
least that mystery with which of all the universe 
beside we are most familiar. It is not an ab- 
straction. It is the concrete source of all our 
understanding, the crystal through whose mys- 
terious depths comes all the knowledge which 
we possess. Mystery of this kind is much more 
endurable than that which hides itself in the 
unprovable depths of atoms, monads, seons, 
electrons, vortices, or even the Unknowable of 
sensational empiricism. It seems even better 
than the abstraction of an indefinite "relation" 
which gains its unity by main strength (and 
awkwardness), putting together that which 
every man naturally puts asunder. At least 
it may be advanced in defense, that this personal 
view gives us a basis on which to account for an 
intelligible world. Personality, at least in its 
human manifestation, can be studied, used, 
and related, while abstractions can only be 
imagined, like the unknown symbols of an alge- 
braic equation. 

Error and Evil 

The problem chiefly haunting realism of the 
254 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

common type is the problem of error. The last 
enemy of personal realism as well as of theism 
is evil and death. 

If reality lies in perception, it becomes 
impossible to account for error. Whatever I 
perceive, or think I perceive, is real, and is what 
it appears to be without reference to any other 
judgment. If the reality lies in the relation 
between thinker and thing, it is impossible to 
see how there can be untruth or unreality of 
false relation. Every man's judgment is as 
good as every other man's. No matter how 
much they may differ in perception all are cor- 
rect. To use the ancient slogan which has 
been recently resurrected, "Man is the measure 
of all things." 

In common-sense realism matter was the 
independent reality which we could accept or 
leave, but which we could not question. Its 
difficulty was not so much in providing for the 
problem of error as it was to account for any 
true understanding. The gulf between mind 
and matter was complete. Mind might arise 
and pass away while matter remained forever 
independent. One could not be sure that the 
mental picture which he obtained was a correct 
one. Neo -realism is heckled by both the prob- 
lem of knowledge and the problem of error. 

Pluralistic realism makes no attempt to solve 
255 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

the problem, choosing rather to ignore it. 
But in thus avoiding the issue others more 
difficult rise up to confront it. These are the 
problems posed by the apparent unity in the 
world, problems of moral responsibility, of 
common understanding, of thought, and even 
of language and history. 

Idealism meets its intensest problem in the 
existence of evil. Here we are told of the glori- 
fication of evil, pain, and sorrow by that spirit 
of self-sacrifice which dignifies the human soul 
and marks the highest conquest of evolutionary 
processes. This noble viewpoint has made 
profound impression upon the choicest person- 
alities of all ages. Yet it needs ever to be 
tempered by the pragmatic tests of concrete 
circumstance and action. The Jewish youth 
with holy zeal dedicated his all to Jehovah, 
saying, "It is corban." Though moved by the 
loftiest of abstract motives, he had need to 
bring his action to the test of concrete circum- 
stances. The loftiest of religious motives and 
the deepest of self-denials did not lead to the 
fullest development of self if thereby he neg- 
lected his duty to his parents. So, an abstract 
idealism is likely to see but half, and that half 
in wrong perspective. Self-sacrifice can never 
in itself, and standing apart from the concrete 
instance, be hailed as the solution of the problem 
25G 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

of pain any more than can the unadulterated 
egotism that ignores it. The virtue of egotism, 
as the virtue of self-sacrifice, is determined by 
the law of the highest good to the individual, 
and to those around him. It needs only to be 
remembered that all self-reservation must be 
kept from selfishness, and must never be tinged 
by any element of moral cowardice, prevarica- 
tion, or untruth. 

Neither the problem of error nor the problem 
of evil can be met and justified on the abstract, 
impersonal plane. The only justification for 
either error or evil, if justification there is, is 
personal. There is no abstract reason why 
half the world should be deluded in its inter- 
pretation of nature and of life. When we come 
to actual cases we can readily see how the pos- 
sibility of error has been a quickener of attention, 
a schoolmaster to the intellectual powers, which 
has presented us with the better part of our 
mental equipment. Through numerous failures 
of judgment, and mistaken interpretations, man 
comes to that mastery of himself and his world 
which gives meaning and power to life. The 
use of judgment is a part of that self -defining ele- 
ment necessary to the possession of personality. 

Likewise, the problem of evil can never be 
solved by reference to abstract principles. 
Sometimes suffering, or the endurance of it, is 
257 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

the sign of moral flabbiness and lack of char- 
acter. The self-imposed flagellations of closet 
saints, and the meaningless sacrifices which men 
make, not for the benefit of humanity but to 
save their own souls, are cases in point. Evil 
never can be figured into an abstract good. The 
possibility of evil, which lies at the root of all 
moral responsibility, will be found, in concrete 
individual cases, necessary to a world of freedom 
and growth. Whether the pain, suffering, or 
evil that befalls a man is going to prove useful 
cannot, however, be determined abstractly, 
but depends on him individually in his reaction 
to it. The wrongs suffered by the individual 
may make him bitter, may drive him into a 
false attitude toward life, and create in him 
false standards and ideals. They may weaken 
him and render him useless. They cannot do 
all this, however, apart from his own will in 
the matter. On the other hand, the presence 
of the possibility of moral evil and the impo- 
sition of suffering may be turned by the indi- 
vidual into the source of moral conquest, the 
achievement of the supreme spiritual self- 
possession. One thing is very certain: if we 
cannot reach and solve the problem through a 
pragmatic personalism, we cannot solve it at 
all. 

The problem arises from the requirements of 
258 






PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

a world of growth and freedom and from the 
transcendent qualities of the human spirit, which 
is continually breaking its bonds from and 
mastering all that is strictly material. 

It is only by a strict personalism that we can 
clear the Divine Being from participation in the 
ancient wrongs, the sins and brutalities of man. 
If we think of God in the pantheistic fashion, 
an Absolute, everywhere in his world of things 
and men, and lacking in those self-defining 
qualities necessary to personality, we have a God 
who is mistaken in our mistakes, who sins in 
our sins, and who has let loose upon humanity 
as from a Pandora's box a brood of horrors 
and crimes for which he is responsible and for 
whose ending he is incapable. But if person- 
ality be the requirement of all life, directly or 
indirectly, the Infinite Personality is bound not 
to infringe upon nor to transgress against the 
personalities of his creatures. In patience he 
waits the late results of that discipline by 
which men shall achieve moral and spiritual 
independence and self-sufficiency like his own. 
There are already many indications that when 
man has become the intellectual master of the 
material universe and the moral master of his 
own purposes, thoughts, and impulses, suffering 
and evil will have vanished from his world. 
They are the growing pains incident to his 
259 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

youth, the concomitants of a passing imper- 
fection, the tormenting evidences of growth or 
of the possibility of growth, the eloquent re- 
minders of that perfect world to come which 
has forever formed the object of his untiring 
search. 

To repeat here the verses of T. E. Brown 
quoted by Bosanquet in his volume on the Value 
and Destiny of the Individual : 

"The man that hath great griefs I pity not; 
'Tis something to be great 
In any wise, and hint the larger state 
Though but in shadow of a shade, God wot! 

"But tenfold one is he who feels all pains 
Not partial, knowing them 
As ripples parted from the gold-beaked stem, 
Wherewith God's galley ever onward strains. 

"To him the sorrows are the tension-thrills 
Of that serene endeavor, 
Which yields to God forever and forever 
The joy that is more ancient than the hills." 



260 



CHAPTER XI 

PERSONALISM AND THE GROUND OF 
BEING 

Personality Assumed or Implied is the 

Basis of Explanation in Current 

Theories 

Because the law of the sufficient reason 
demands an intelligent source of intelligible 
results, widely differing theories and systems 
pretending to impersonalism and materialism 
will be found implying personality in the meta- 
physical ground, somewhere in the process of 
their reasoning. This is quite sure to be true 
as a matter of course in any system which 
attempts to explain a world of which intelligence 
is a part. 

Spencer hoped to found a system that would 
leave the ground of being quite impersonal. 
Driven by the infinite regress of cause and effect, 
he was led to affirm unknowable qualities of the 
First Cause. But in order to float his theories 
he had continual recourse to the affirmation 
of personal qualities, purpose, power, and 
choice or selection, in this same Unknowable 
without appearing conscious of his inconsistency. 

More modern theories which have recourse 
261 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

for metaphysical explanation to theories of 
forces inherent in matter, to aeons, electrons, 
and vortices, unconsciously assume as necessary 
to atoms and electrons that very intelligent 
purpose and choice which it is their purpose to 
explain. Even a philosophy of "vital elan" 
finds it necessary to make a similar assumption. 
The term "vital impulse" is taken as sufficiently 
abstract to cover the case, and then it is dis- 
covered that a "vital elan" must have a certain 
degree of personality about it if it is to be used 
in explanation of the existence of a personal 
world. So continually the "vital elan" is 
referred to as if it were an abiding personality; 
and no consistent metaphysics has been able 
to escape the implication. Of course, one can 
reduce his language to mathematical nicety and 
with scientific skill avoid speaking the fateful 
word which will bring his theory falling about 
his ears, but he can scarcely avoid the attempt 
to make his theory adequate to explain that 
which he proposes for explanation. Just here 
it is that the most violent impersonalist endeav- 
ors to work personality into the universe under 
cover. It may be a private satisfaction to 
endow an atom or its more invisible equivalent 
with power of choice, freedom, intelligence, 
and purpose, in order to hold before our aston- 
ished eyes a result that has been wrought in the 



THE GROUND OF BEING 

dark like the miracle of the magician. The 
mind, however, which does not desire to be 
deceived cannot take seriously the thought that 
the rabbit, the goose, the flag, and the deck of 
cards, either sprang from thin air or were really 
concealed in the hat of the entertainer. The 
really inquiring mind will seek for the trick in 
the uncommon procedure. A progress toward 
the explanation of intelligence which denies 
intelligence until it is, so to speak, slipped dex- 
terously from the sleeve of language is really 
not quite satisfying to the alert mind. It does 
not seem worth while to deny teleological 
reality to the Ground of Being if it is our dark 
intention to make the teleological inference 
under a form of words such as "attractions" 
and "repulsions," which seem to explain only 
because they are purely hypothetical and 
abstract; that is, they beg the question. The 
metaphysical magician takes out of the hat the 
self-same rabbit that he put in, but there is 
nothing cosmic nor metaphysical about his 
proceeding, except to the minds of the very 
credulous. 

Affirming Personality in the World- 
Ground is not to Confuse God 
with His World 
The greatest difficulties of the Absolutist 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

philosophy arise from the identification of God 
with his world. Immanence easily lapses into 
pantheism, in which the world becomes the body 
of the indwelling Infinite, the corporate ex- 
pression of an Infinite and Eternal power, which 
includes all things in itself, and is the Ultimate 
and Absolute One. The trouble is that it is 
compelled thereby to include some very shock- 
ing and inconvenient things, such as an imper- 
fect world of sin, wickedness, horror, and blood- 
shed. Our medicine may be sugar-coated, but 
we cannot quite avoid the after effects because 
its real character has been hidden from sight 
and smell. We would be saved this unsatis- 
factory result by affirming personality in the 
World-Ground and a world of lesser person- 
alities and things upheld and maintained by the 
unceasing purpose and will of such self -defining 
Purpose. God would then be immanent in 
his world but not identical with it. There is a 
true sense in which the artist can be said to be 
immanent in his work. Every line, every com- 
bination of color is the result of the artist's 
experience, character, skill, and personality. 
No other man could or would express himself 
in exactly the same terms. Once you know 
the artist and become acquainted with his 
way of handling a subject, you can tell his 
work as easily without his signature as with it, 



THE GROUND OF BEING 

for his work is all written over with himself. 
It is the expression of the unique in his person- 
ality. Now, no creator can become identical 
with his creation without ceasing to exist as a 
creator. To make God identical with his 
creation would be to destroy him. It would be 
ridiculous to declare the artist identical with 
his picture. If the artist created the picture, 
he is something more than the picture, though 
he has written himself into the picture with the 
greatest faithfulness, the utmost devotion. 
He is in his work it is true, but it is also true that 
he transcends it. 

A Changing World Implies not a Changing 
but a Living God 
A God whose essence is change, whose quality 
is to change through and through, I think has 
been already shown an impossible conception. 
Such a God, unable to link together his ever- 
flowing states would be the mere creature of 
the moving flux of the world. Man would 
then be the only God we know, for he at least, 
and he alone, in all the changing universe is 
master of his own fate, directing his own destiny. 
It is not necessary, however, to affirm a changing 
God in order to affirm a changing world. Our 
own transcendence of the undeviating flow 
should teach us this. In fact, the ancient 
W5 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Jewish and Christian idea of a living God will be 
found sufficient. To live implies an enriching 
content of experience, but it does not imply 
absolute change. It does not imply change of 
purpose, love, or identity. There never would 
have been the difficulty with this idea that there 
has been were it not for the confusions that 
arise from ascribing mathematical perfection to 
the Divine Being, instead of keeping to the 
essentials of personality, purpose, and character. 
Here the ancient ghosts of spatial and temporal 
thinking have arisen to trouble us. If we will 
think for a moment of the attributes commonly 
ascribed to the Divine Being, we shall see how 
many of them belong not necessarily to the 
divine character, but are, rather, the implica- 
tions of our human limitations. They are 
human limitations from which we feel that 
God must be free. And there are certain of 
the ascribed attributes of God that are merely 
our statement that God is not holden of our 
limitations. Omnipresence, omnipotence, om- 
niscience, and a brood of others are quanti- 
tative, and are but the contrast of our human 
limitations, the shadow cast by spatial and 
temporal limits under which we labor, but which 
cannot be allowed to limit God. Our incon- 
sistency springs not from the affirmation of 
these quantitative attributes but from our 



THE GROUND OF BEING 

attempt to measure their meaning to the 
Supreme Personality with the yardstick of our 
human limitations. They are the shadow of our 
own relations to the temporal and spatial order. 
We do not know their meaning for the Supreme 
Personality. These attributes are summed up 
in his self-creative activity in the ongoing of 
the world. The relations of the Supreme 
Intelligence to the temporal and spatial order 
cannot arise out of the necessities of his being, 
but are concerned with the form of his purpose 
toward an uncompleted or unfinished world. 1 
"Why," it may be asked, "did he not make a 
complete or perfect world at the beginning?" 
The only answer is that to a moral being no 
world would be perfect without other moral 
beings and moral attainment may well be the 
final end of creative activity. 

When we say "God is love," we affirm some- 
thing qualitative, which is quite different from 
temporal or spatial attributes and has to do 



1 So far as it may be given us to understand, space must 
mean to God the differentiation between the activity of his 
own will and consciousness and that of his free creatures. 
Not being, as finite personalities, under the form of corpo- 
reality, space would seem to be to him some such differentia- 
tion. As to time, that would be but the story of purpose in 
the process of fulfillment. The very incompleteness of that 
purpose is a token of contingency in result and action. It 
is the concomitant of freedom. 

267 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

with character. 2 Strictly considered, divine and 
human perfection may require other than 
merely static elements, for it scarcely can be 
conceived that any form of existence is less 
perfect than say a geological formation. The 
perfection of the living, on the contrary, lies in 
its nonstatic quality. If it ceases to grow, it 
dies and becomes something less perfect. On 
the other hand, there are some elements in 
living personality which do not change nor 
pass, namely, the self-identifying personality 
with its consciousness of survival and differen- 
tiation; the moral qualities of love, honor, 
justice, righteousness, loyalty; these grow richer 
in passing experience, but they need not change 
in perfection. A mother's love, to repeat an 
illustration already used, is not changed in 
essence and character by the flow of years. It 
is as perfect when the child is a babe as it will 
be when the child has become a grown man. 
Experience in time may have added richness 
and meaning to the content of that love, but 
neither joy nor adversity, blessing nor bitter- 
ness has changed it. Her motherhood may 
be perfect from the beginning, though it be- 
comes yearly more meaningful. For contin- 

2 An interesting discussion of this phase of the subject is 
given by J. S. Mackenzie in Mind, 1904, p. 367 et passim; 
also in Mind, 1912, p. 341f. 

268 



THE GROUND OF BEING 

gency, the possibility of doing differently, and 
growth, these are necessary to the perfection 
of the living human personality, and it is con- 
ceivable that they may be in some manner 
necessary to the perfection of a living God. 

It becomes, indeed, impossible to apply the 
term "living" to the Divine Being without 
thinking of it in some such way as this. The 
world in its ongoing is not necessarily a static 
affair, forever predetermined. It may be on its 
way to an outworking all the more sublime 
because an Infinite Free Spirit is at the helm. 
The whole condition of the present spatial and 
temporal order might conceivably be changed 
to meet rising conditions of life. Such changes 
may be merely waiting upon new moral and 
spiritual achievements in man. If it be true 
that "in him we live and move and have our 
being," and that creation calls for the contin- 
uous exercise of His creative purpose, every act 
of discovery contains an element of faith. 
Columbus's venture on untried seas, the trust 
of the first aviator, the antennae of the first 
wireless apparatus were as much the act of faith, 
the expression of a prayerful belief in the Divine, 
as they are expressions of scientific thought. 
So far as man keeps himself in line with the 
orderly uniformities, submitting his will to a 
higher, there seem no limits to his possible 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

attainment. The watchword of the modern 
scientific investigator might well be, "Accord- 
ing to thy faith be it." God meets man's 
intelligent and lawful faith with willing purpose 
as we travel from the seen toward the unseen. 
And, further, unless the content of the divine 
experience is susceptible thus to growth it 
becomes impossible to say wherein the moral 
welfare of man, love, worship, or devotion, is 
of any moment to God. Certainly in the 
qualitative and positive attributes of the 
Divine Being we have those abiding and neces- 
sary characteristics that form the backbone of 
all religious thinking and living. And we shall 
at the same stroke rid ourselves of the age-long 
dispute about the relation of God to the tem- 
poral order, for time in the eternal sense could 
mean not that the eternal is dependent upon 
experience in time, but that for him it is but an 
order of succession dependent on his will and 
purpose. 

Personal Realism Provides a Philosophi- 
cal Basis for a Doctrine of Incar- 
nation 
(a) Impossible, holding a view of God as static, 
to show how he could be in Christ. 
It is impossible in any view of God as an 
Absolute, forever static and self-contained, to 
270 



THE GROUND OF BEING 

offer a reasonably philosophical hypothesis for 
a doctrine of incarnation. Dark and unanswer- 
able questions at once arise as to how any mani- 
festation in space and time, bound to the limits 
of our human days and years, could be at the 
same time the Absolute. And so under the weight 
of logical inconsistency theism often has 
broached a departmental and divided God and 
given cause for the charge of tri-theism which 
the hostile have been glad to term polytheism. 

Here again the questions that trouble us are 
wholly quantitative, like omnipresence, omnipo- 
tence, omniscience, and necessity, yet in spite 
of all a God but partially in Christ has not 
satisfied the feeling of men. 

Is it not plain that life itself must become a 
horrible dream overburdened with hopeless 
problems unless this God who made us is in 
some real and active sense participator in 
our struggles, pains, and moral victories? If 
as a living God he maintains any tangible rela- 
tion to his creation it must mean just this. An 
incarnation is demanded to meet the subtlest 
questions of the moral universe. Incarnation 
means a continuous divine participation in our 
life, our sorrows, and our struggles with evil. 
We must hold that God in some sense always 
has been participator in the life of the world, 
and so we speak of an eternal incarnation, and 
271 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

of the profound character of the cross as an 
everlasting principle of human action. The 
dark antinomies of the problem of evil grow less 
dark. The existence of evil is the price paid 
for free moral character and the fatherhood of 
free spirits. But evil is within the control of 
man. As we do away with it, we help to build 
a perfect world in which we can rejoice as 
being free colaborers with him. 

But questions will arise concerning the 
limited nature of a human God. To posit a 
Divine Presence in Christ raises insuperable 
questions in many minds. There is no more 
limitation of the Supreme by his presence in 
Christ than there is in imagining him as creating 
the world, or in relation of any vital kind to the 
spiritual nature of man. The obscurities at this 
point arise out of assumptions of the temporal 
and spatial order which do not hold for the 
Divine Consciousness. How an incarnation can 
be is doubtless a great mystery. How a human 
body can be possessed and influenced by a 
nonspatial soul is likewise a very great mystery. 
Nevertheless, it is an ascertainable fact. We 
need not assume in order to provide for an 
incarnation that the Divine Consciousness abdi- 
cated the throne for thirty-three years, nor, on 
the other hand, that the human Jesus was 
consciously holding the planets to their orbits. 
272 



THE GROUND OF BEING 

That we have thought either of these concep- 
tions necessary has been due to fallacies of 
spatialized and temporalized human thinking. 
Our difficulties are akin to those that faced us in 
assuming quantitative attributes of God. It 
may help us in this connection to remember that 
even human self -consciousness is not limited to 
a single object of consciousness at a time. It 
can be conscious of several objects and several 
motives and several goals at once. It not only 
can be conscious but it can be conscious of con- 
scious states without any difficulty or confusion. 
It is only when we begin analytically to enumer- 
ate states, to intellectualize concerning them 
as Bergson would say, that we find theoretical 
difficulties springing up. 

(b) Does away with the question of how God 
could manifest himself in historic time. 
If, now, we turn from quantitative attributes, 
concerning which we can say nothing only that 
the Divine is not holden of our temporal and 
spatial limitations, to the qualitative attributes, 
we find these most important attributes repre- 
sented in the character of Jesus beyond power 
of gainsaying. Inasmuch as we do find these 
and inasmuch as temporal and spatial qualities 
are the reflection of our own necessity rather 
than fundamental divine attributes, we honestly 
273 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

can declare that God was in Christ in the most 
real sense that man can know. 

Christology is the assumption that the moral 
qualities of God are the essential ones, that 
they are the ones we are capable of comprehend- 
ing, and that they are supreme. The world 
can be completed on no other basis. The con- 
crete appearance of goodness anywhere is of 
God, a manifestation of God, and we need not 
deny it nor commit theological hari kari in 
recognizing it. 

We are thus able to free ourselves from the 
perplexity of how God can manifest himself in a 
historical time and personality. Time and 
space are to him both transcendent and real. 

A Personal World-Ground Provides for 
"God, Freedom, and Immortality" 

Let us restate briefly what already has been 
discussed — the fundamental relation of a doc- 
trine of personality in God to the main problem. 
"How does a personal World-Ground provide 
for God, freedom, and immortality?" 

The first consideration must be this, that an 
impersonal World-Ground leaves man in lone 
moral possession of the universe, and yet the 
helpless and unsurviving slave of dead matter, 
wholly unaccountable. Or if this World- 
Ground be conceived as an impersonal Abso- 
274 



THE GROUND OF BEING 

lute, he is lacking in those personal qualities 
which give him concrete value to man. Again, 
though less lonely, the personality of man 
remains inexplicable. 

In the second place, any form of imperson- 
alism reerects the closed system of necessity. 
The one essential of freedom is contingency, the 
power of choice, and this is impossible to any 
but an intelligent purposive being. It would 
be most difficult to explain how there could 
be either freedom or life in an uncontin- 
gent Divine Being. Nor does the cause of 
freedom stop with the Divine Being. Unless 
there is freedom in the Divine Being there is 
none in man. Man is then but the prey of 
pitilessly driving forces which rid him of moral 
responsibility for his acts and choices. 

Third, any system which assumes imperson- 
ality in the World-Ground shuts the door in the 
face of one of humanity's most cherished and 
enduring hopes, the hope of immortality. 
Perhaps some one will arise to say that this is 
no affair of philosophy, which will be incorrect, 
for the abiding instincts of the human race 
cannot be ruled off the field of explanation 
without negating the explanation itself. 

If personality is able in its own intrinsic 
reality to abide the temporal flux, if it contains 
self-creative possibilities, there is nothing inher- 
275 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

ently inconsistent for a belief in its survival of 
a world of time and space. 

And surely this conception will, for men who 
live deeply, in an age that is putting civiliza- 
tion to its greatest tests, be more satisfying than 
the suggestion that the only immortality for 
which we can philosophically hope is one of 
works and influence, that survive for some brief 
and indefinite period after we are gone. 

In the view of personal realism, personality 
stands upon a plane of its own. It is the 
ultimate, self -causing reality. Its very nature 
forbids its absorption into anything else, even 
though that something else be the Absolute. 
Its ability to transcend the spatial and temporal 
order bespeaks for it an existence when time 
and space shall be no more. 

Personality is the sole surviving principle in 
a world of change. And, surely, this conception 
is no more difficult than to posit an original 
"vital impulse, " constantly repeating itself, 
but lacking in all power of self-direction and 
purpose, and possessing a meaningless sort of 
immortality. So far as we can have knowl- 
edge, "God and the soul abide." 



276 



CHAPTER Xn 
INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM 

The crusades marked the break-up of an 
institutionalized and provincial world. In poli- 
tics, the crusades, the resort of kings to further 
the monarchial system, were really the faint 
beginnings of a movement that ended far off 
in a high-tide of democracy. Intended to 
increase the power and authority of the church, 
they introduced a liberalizing tendency that 
resulted in the Reformation. Entered upon in 
a blind and dogmatic devotion, they opened 
the flood-gates of the revival of learning and 
gave to science its early impetus. In a day 
when philosophy was scholastic and pedantic 
were sown the seeds destined to revolutionize 
philosophical systems. 

Of these various developments, commonly 
known as the Renaissance, the deeper move- 
ments came to the later flowering. The period 
of revolution in government and of the en- 
lightenment in philosophy was really the after- 
flowering of the earlier attainments. 

The whole movement from the fourteenth 
to the early nineteenth centuries is the story of 
a developing individualism. It represented a 
277 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

breaking away from cramping institutionalized 
forms, the protest of the individual against 
tyrannical dominance and overlordship of every 
kind. It nursed the dream that the largest 
good to the whole could come only out of the 
largest development of the individual. Hence 
it was a movement of vast significance in its 
historical results. Upon its doctrine and 
achievements have been built some of the most 
precious accomplishments of society. 

It is interesting to note some of the late and 
culminating achievements in this process, for 
a question arises whether we have now reaped 
the full possible results without the introduc- 
tion of a new and more far-reaching principle 
than that of individualism. 

Rousseau might be named as the chief spokes- 
man for individualism in its late political evo- 
lution. He represented that mighty political 
revulsion which resulted in the establishment 
of independence in America and culminated in 
a new democracy in Europe, 

Nor was Rousseau's influence confined to the 
realm of politics. He gave a tremendous impe- 
tus to the romantic movement in literature. 
The prevailing passion of the age was a passion 
for self-expression. Stress was laid upon per- 
sonal meditation, reflection, and experience 
altogether out of proportion to their real value. 
278 



INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM 

The writing of intimate journals became a 
common literary occupation. Out of this grew 
an overvaluation of both the cultural and reli- 
gious worth of these inner experiences. One 
most profoundly influenced was the poet Goethe. 
His life story became one of an effort for indi- 
vidual development at any moral cost. The 
end of emotional attainment was held to justify 
the means, with the result that morals, religion, 
and sense of honor were sacrificed to individual 
Kultur. We note in Goethe the beginning of 
that process which has influenced so profoundly 
the literature of the nineteenth century and 
which has given us Nietzsche and the contempo- 
rary doctrine of the superman. 

Rousseau's Emile became the basis of an 
individualistic theory of education which is a 
widely prevailing standard in the educational 
system of to-day. Its development has been 
attended by an ever-increasing secularization 
of education. Worse than that, the place of 
morality and religion in cultural development 
has not only been ignored, in too many quarters 
it has become educational anathema. It has 
been dubbed unscientific and a prejudice has 
been created against it. Pure culture has been 
held to be not only complete when separated 
from deep religious sentiment, but religious senti- 
ment has been widely held as incompatible with 
279 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

deep culture or with scientific attainment. The 
influence of individualism in education has run 
the limit of its progress in the Prussian Kultur 
and in many American institutions of learning. 

On the ethical side the progress of individ- 
ualism was strangely influenced from behind 
its own age. Spinoza was scarcely known for a 
hundred years after his work was done. That 
he became a power then was largely due to the 
resurrection of his system by Herder and its 
acceptance by Goethe. Spinoza's doctrine that 
we become one with God by an act of reason 
becomes the keynote of Goethe's Faust. What- 
ever increases the understanding or is useful to 
the individual cultural development is morally 
good. According to this view pity, shame, 
remorse, repentance are but vices that repeat 
the offense. One who regrets an evil past is 
weak and is conscious of his weakness. The 
will to knowledge and to power is the moving 
element in great characters. Thus was injected 
into the world of education, art, and literature 
that subtle poison which has embarrassed indi- 
vidualism with an intolerable burden. 

This ethical development might have been 
far more widespread among the nations of 
democracy had there not been another move- 
ment contemporaneous with it and which pros- 
pered on the soil of individualism. This 
280 



INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM 

movement was religious, and though technically 
identified with Methodism has permeated all 
surviving forms of Protestantism and influenced 
Roman Catholicism itself. Methodism turned 
the wine of the new enthusiasm for individualism 
into new religious wine-flasks. Great emphasis 
was placed upon individual internal experiences 
and upon individual culture. While this no 
doubt led to many excesses and to some mis- 
understanding of religious reality, it had the 
balance wheel of moral and religious devotion 
which kept it from running into a pure selfish- 
ness like that of supermanism. In fact, when 
eventual history comes to be written it will be 
discovered as an inestimable influence in indi- 
vidual restraint and the moralization and 
strengthening of free institutions. 

In truth had it not been for this deeper 
religious influence running parallel with the 
movement of individualism, individualism could 
have accomplished nothing for democracy but 
utter ruin. Democracy without moral and 
spiritual restraint is impossible, and has been 
so demonstrated from the time of the excesses 
of the Reign of Terror to the exaltation of 
Russian Bolshevikism. True democracy means 
self-government, and self-government is impos- 
sible without the presence in the individual of 
restraining moral and spiritual influences. 
281 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

In science individualism has manifested itself 
in the emphasis upon the empirical method. 
Each individual can conduct his own experiment 
and his experience becomes the ultimate word 
for science. The tendency on the whole has 
been to protest against the restraining influence 
of any unity or system and to emphasize the 
pluralistic view of life. The extreme of this 
development is to be seen in men of the type 
of Haeckel, and in many unjustified claims of 
modern materialistic science. 

In philosophy this movement has been along 
the lines of empiricism, realism, positivism, and 
intellectual skepticism. A persistent attempt 
has been made to clear the philosophical field of 
all religious and theistic implications in an effort 
to be more scientific and exact. The result has 
been a one-sided and inadequate view of the 
human person. Viewed as a mere receptacle 
for material and outward born impulses, or at 
best a conglomeration of reactions, the indi- 
vidual in philosophic thought has become little 
else than an automaton incapable of moral 
action and passing on the exact ratio of impres- 
sions received. 

The Cultural Ideals of Individualism 

With this interpretation of the person it is 

easy to arrive at a perverted view of individual 



INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM 

culture, such as possessed the minds of many of 
the early and late romanticists. The emphasis 
on the evolutionary theory seemed to put the 
weightier elements of development beyond the 
power of individual responsibility. It further 
laid great stress upon the development of the 
individual as the goal of all progress. While it 
exalted the development of individuals it like- 
wise taught that less fortunate forms must 
perish to create the typical man. If one, then, 
were a "free spirit," typical man, or "super- 
man," there should be no distress at the suf- 
fering of the less perfect for one's own better 
advancement and deeper culture. One needed 
only a certain egotistic assurance that he was of 
the superman type and all the world was to lie 
like an oyster at his feet, to be opened and 
swallowed. 

It does not take such an individualism long, 
even though in the beginning it starts from a 
socialistic standpoint of opposition to estab- 
lished society, to become the narrowest and 
meanest kind of an autocracy. It may be the 
autocracy of a class, of birth, of education, of 
religious beliefs, or even of the proletarian. 
Its significant mark is that its hand is set against 
all other classes, its dream is of individual pre- 
ferment and exaltation. Its hope is the renova- 
tion of the world by the domination of all other 
283 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

wills to its own. Its weakness lies in its 
egotistic selfishness. 

In the name of individualistic development 
the greatest crimes have been and are being 
committed. The only reason that such a 
theory can blind the hearts of men is because 
they fail to take into account the reality of moral 
and spiritual values. An aestheticism which 
leads the poet or artist to plunge into moral 
excesses for their cultural value overlooks the 
fact that any moral excess removes the fineness 
and delicacy which alone can make art or 
poetry great. A culture which is built up at 
the expense of toil and hardship of the forgotten 
multitudes is a false culture which carries with 
it its own curse and its own undoing. 

It is not strange that such a theory of culture 
should eventuate in the immoral and perverted 
doctrines of Nietzsche, and that these in a land 
where all scientific and cultural attainments 
have for many years been divorced from the 
deeper religious and even moral elements^ should 
yield a fruitage of barbarity that has shocked 
the whole world. Such is the natural outcome 
of a morally untempered individualism. 

The Contrasting Ideals of Personalism 
The dominant principle of Personalism is 
the dependence of individual culture upon the 
284 



INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM 

moral and spiritual values. Recognition is 
given to the fact that any culture which lacks 
these is lacking in essential humanity and cannot 
possess a lasting influence over men. 

In the following out of this higher individual- 
ism it may be necessary for the individual to 
make the utmost sacrifice of material advantage 
in order that he seize upon the finer gifts which 
are possible to human personality. He may 
have to sink his individuality in a higher good 
in order to rise to the heights of personality. 
The possession of life itself, often held to be the 
greatest good, is seen by Personalism to be 
inferior to the possession say of one's honor, or 
integrity, or self-respect. Moreover, if the 
well-being of the many demands the self-sac- 
rifice of the individual, the individual reaches 
his highest possible personal development by 
joyful surrender. If to be loyal to the highest 
principles of morality it be necessary to lay 
down one's life, one by that very act does the 
thing of greatest cultural value to himself. If, 
on the other hand, one is to save his life by 
dishonor, by being untrue to the moral welfare 
of himself or others, life itself becomes of little 
value because unfaithful to those higher inter- 
ests which make it worth living. The truth is 
beautifully expressed in Emerson's quotation 
for the soldiers' memorial in Cambridge: 
285 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

" 'Tis man's perdition to be safe, 
When for the truth he ought to die." 

In Personalism the value of individual 
culture is not overlooked. It is simply carried 
to the higher realm of action, and here the 
highest values can be attained only by the 
highest self-forgetfulness. The culture of Per- 
sonalism leaves no bad taste in the mouth, no 
pangs of heartbreak for others, no blasting or 
festering trail of evil behind it. It is as benev- 
olent in the general culture as it is in that of 
the individual. 

The Present Conflict between Individual- 
ism and Personalism 

Never in the history of the world has the 
battle been so clearly drawn between these 
conflicting ideals of life. 

Individualism with its exaltation of individual 
preferment at the expense of the many, with 
its ethical doctrine that whatever is useful in 
furthering its culture is morally right, with its 
scorn of the weak and helpless as beyond the 
pale of its care and responsibility, with its 
disregard and skepticism toward all spiritual 
values, is lined up in a great world conflict 
against all who believe in the inviolable human 
rights of the least and feeblest in the social 
structure, the personalists. 



INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM 

The personalists, despite their philosophy, 
their previous condition of cultural servitude, 
and their previous devotion to individualistic 
theories, are seeing with new vision that no 
elements are cultural unless they include the 
well being of all. The swift lesson is now being 
taught a slow moving world that when the fun- 
damental human rights of one are menaced the 
rights of all are endangered. And, better than 
this, vast multitudes have learned how sweet 
and beautiful it is to lay down one's life not only 
for one's country but for righteousness in the 
earth, and for the coming kingdom of God. 

And just in the measure that men are counting 
not their lives dear unto themselves, in that same 
measure do they experience the coming of the 
real superman — the man who can lay down his 
life for his friends. 

The Cross as the Solution of the Deeper 

Problems of Life 

One would be bold indeed who should propose 

the solution of the dark problem of evil, and to 

offer a principle on which alone permanent 

institutions of society may be organized. Yet 

in these trying days gleams of light are coming 

to illuminate our way, Not that they have 

been wanting to other days, but those that come 

now are very practical and very personal. 

287 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

We can see how a crisis has been brought upon 
the world in which if the things dearest to 
civilization are to be saved many men must 
voluntarily lay down life. Values superior to 
life itself have arisen above the horizon of the 
average human thought. 

What man has, in the days just gone, been 
so thoughtless as not to prefer his son dead 
upon the field of honor to having him a slacker 
and a sneak — willing to live and prosper through 
the sacrifice of the noble and the brave? 

It is impossible that some other lessons of life 
should fail to follow in the train of this recog- 
nition. In days of luxury, comfort, and inde- 
pendence it was easy to listen to the devil of a 
selfish individualism. One could so easily shut 
one's ears to the sufferings and injustices of the 
multitudes. One's personal comfort was so 
important that any demand of humanity or 
religion which broke in upon comfort was con- 
sidered preposterous. That one should en- 
danger his life for others was the brave act of a 
fool. And at the same time we were obsessed 
by a fear of suffering and were crying out 
against a world of pain and demanding that 
the theists show us the solution of the problem 
of evil or cease prating about a good God, or any 
other kind of God for that matter. 

In the meantime we are coming to see that the 



INDIVIDUALISM AND PERSONALISM 

responsibility for the greatest suffering of these 
times, and sufferings that make those of other 
days seem insignificant, is not to be placed 
upon God, but upon evil men. Just as the real 
evil of the world is seen to be the result of an 
unholy, lustful and greedy individualism, we 
are beginning to see likewise that it can be done 
away and an age of peace brought in only as 
men are willing to give up everything material 
for the greatness of a spiritual ideal. 

There is in this fact too a suggestion for the 
solution of the problem of evil so far as it 
touches the individual. The individual can 
make the pains and sufferings of life yield him 
a rich treasure of personal and spiritual attain- 
ment according to the spirit in which he meets 
them. Death itself may become but the glory 
which consummates his earthly career. 

So much for the individual solution. Where 
it touches the wider ranges of society at large 
it is not so easy. There is much of mystery 
and darkness. Heavy responsibilities are thrust 
upon God — why did he make a world that 
could will to evil and to involve the innocent 
in suffering? There are two considerations that 
arrest the attention and constrain us at least 
to withhold judgment. The first is whether 
there would be any value or reality to moral 
freedom if evil were impossible. The second 
289 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

regards the part of God. Suppose it shall be 
discovered that this life of moral possibility is 
the superior goal of creation, and that in order 
to create men in his own spiritual likeness he has 
himself been willing to partake in their suffering. 
If the concrete solution of the problem of evil 
is to be found in the individual attitude toward 
the woes of life through a spiritual self-mastery 
that glorifies all, then the endurance of the 
cross by the Master and Creator of Life himself 
must furnish the philosophical and theological 
justification of an uncompleted world. 



290 



INDEX 



INDEX 

Absolutism assumes personality in the Absolute, 228. 
Absolutist tendency toward pantheism, 263f. 
Atomism, when effective, assumes personality in the atom, 262. 
Atomistic conclusion of Bergson, 48. 

Bassanio choosing the caskets, 67. 

Beauchamp, Miss, as an example of dissociation, 209f. 

Beethoven, 131. 

Being as vibration, 45. 

Bergson and idealistic dialectic, 25. 

impersonalism, 25, 71, 74, 142, 152ff., 174. 
materialism, 24, 47, 48, 

personalism, 26, 123ff., 134f., 142, 176, 188f. 
psychoparallelism, 36. 
committed to materialism, 47f., 154, 187f. 
Bergson's aim, 24, 25. 

in his definition of matter, 31. 

criticism of Kant's doctrine of God, 152. 

definition of freedom, 132ff. 

God, 153f, 174. 

intuition, 82ff. 

life and spirit, 34f., 37f., 69. 
life and spirit as duration, 69, 72. 
life and spirit as intersection of matter 

and spirit, 69ff, 188. 
life and spirit as vital impulse, 69, 73. 
definition of matter, 31. 

as inverse of movement, 32. 
uncertainty, 32. 
personality, 176ff, 180f, 186f. 
space, 108ff. 
time, 117f. 
doctrine of the world-ground, 153f. 
neo-realism, 58, 61, 77, 78. 
Bolshevism a phase of individualism, 281. 
Bosanquet, 260. 
Bowne, 26. 

Bowne's definition of matter and spirit, 39. 
Browne, T. E., poem quoted, 260. 
Burbank, Luther, 93, 234. 

293 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Carr, H. Wildon, 174. 

Causality and duration, 123. 

Causation and freedom, 132ff., 142ff., 147. 

efficient, and phenomenal, 142fl\, 147f, 231f. 

comes back to purpose, 243. 
mechanical, static, 75, 148, 151. 
provided for in personal realism, 240f . 
the unique possession of personality, 231f. 
uncaused, in ourselves, and in God, 128f, 147f., 

150f., 218f., 231. 
unexplained by potentiality, 75. 
Change, absolute, impossible in world of intelligence, 158f. 
as original, 156f. 
implies a living God, 265. 
in God, 158f. 

applicable only to experience, 163f. 
in human personality, 158f, 164. 
Changelessness of God in purpose and righteousness, 161, 168f. 
Coe, The Psychology of Religion quoted, 210. 
Conservation of energy, an overworked doctrine, 219. 
Contingency necessary to freedom, 275. 
Creativity, human, 131, 150f., 218f. 
Cross, the, as the principle of life, 272. 
as means of culture, 285f. 
the solution of life's deepest problems, 287f . 
Crusades, influence on the world of learning, 277f . 
Culture, dependent on moral and spiritual values, 284f. 

Dante, 131. 

Definition, importance of, to being, reality, and life, 31. 

Descartes and the philosophy of change, 23, 144. 

Descartes' instantaneous metaphysics, 123, 143. 

Determinism in Bergson, 73f, 157. 

Dissociation, a problem for neo-realism, 211. 

illustrated in the case of Miss Beauchamp, 209f . 
not of personality, but of conscious states, 
208ff. 
Dualism and personality, 68f. 

of matter and spirit, 36f., 40, 56f. 
ultimate solution in personality, 68f., 72, 184f., 
250f. 
Duration and causation, 123. 

freedom, 121f, 134f. 

personality, 44, 71f., 124f., 227, 230. 

speed of vibration, 117f. 

spirit, 43. 

294 



INDEX 

Duration as succession in phenomena, 123. 

cannot solve conflict between mind and matter,43,58. 

causal, only in personality, 124, 129. 

defined, 71f. 

jnGod,156f. 

in relation to time, 120ff. 

in things and persons must be reconciled, 145. 

necessary to freedom, 135, 139f, 145. 

of persons, 121ff., 134f., 145f., 227. 

of things, 121ff., 126, 134f., 145f., 227. 

possible only to personality, 72, 129, 135, 139f. 

"pure," a succession in states of consciousness, 123f. 

related to space, 114f. 

Education by standards of individualism, 279. 
in morals and religion, 279. 
secularized, 279. 
Elan, as original impulse, 157. 

in creative energy, 145, 156f. 
must be intelligent, 157. 
Emerson, lines for the soldier's monument, 285f. 
Emile, Rousseau's theory of education, 279. 
Error as viewed by neo-realism, 204f. 

not solved on the impersonal plane, 258. 
the chief problem of realism, 254f. 
Ethics of individualism. 

Evil, future of, determined by moral agents, 107. 
its origin, 107. 

its possibility, the condition of character, 289. 
may offer the opportunity of self-mastery, 258f. 
not solved on the impersonal plane, 258. 
not the work of God, 289. 
solved personally, 289. 
suggestion of solution, 289. 
the chief problem of personal realism, 254-256. 
the problem of idealism, 256. 
within man's control, 272. 
Evolution and individualism, 283. 

due to an increment, 150, 241f. 
dependent on unconditioned creative activity, 75, 
140, 146, 150f. 233f. 
divine self-consciousness, 161. 
purpose in, 146f. 
Experience brings richer content to mother's love, not greater 
love, 268. 
contracted, as time, 117f. 
295 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Faith present in discovery, 269. 
Faust in Goethe's philosophy, 280. 
Fite, 231. 

Foreknowledge and determinism, 138f. 
Freedom and causation, 132ff., \47f. 
Freedom and duration, 134f. 

foreknowledge, 138f. 
miracle, 138f. 

defined by Bergson, 132ff. 

impossible where homogeneity is the result of initial 
impulse, 73-76. 

in God needed to ground freedom in man, 275. 

in impersonalism impossible, 174ff. 

in personality alone, 72, 140f, 147f, 175f, 216f, 231. 

in the philosophy of change, 102f. 

in unconscious life, 135f., 140. 

not to be had apart from intelligence, 140. 

of personality as attained through the doctrine of 
duration, 124, 134, 139, 159. 

purposeless, untenable, 137f. 

through contingency, 275. 
French romanticism and the doctrine of intuition, 24. 
Functional response to environment not freedom, 136. 

Genius and intuition, 100. 
God as change, 153f., 156, 158f., 164ff. 
growing in experience, 172. 

living implies enriching content of experience, 266. 
rather than changing, 265. 
sufficient for contingency, 171. 
related to duration, 156, 158f., 166. 
static could not be in Christ, 270f . 
contingent, therefore living, 275. 
how immanent, 264. 

in the philosophy of change, 102, 150, 153f, 158f. 
made dependent upon matter, 154. 
must be an abiding self-consciousness, 161. 
self-creative, 169. 

transcendent as well as immanent, 265. 
not departmental, 271. 
not responsible for evil, 259. 
not static, 165, 168. 
not subject to his world, 164. 
related to the world, 165. 

to time and space through an uncompleted 
world, 267. 

296 



INDEX 

God transcendent of time, 166f. 
God's appearance in historic time reasonable, 273. 
God's attributes, character, and relation to temporal and 
spatial world, 172. 
qualitative or quantitative, 273. 

partnership in suffering, 290. 

perfection in life, 268. 

perfection, one of righteousness, 163. 

relation to spatial and temporal order, 160, 166f. 
Goethe and individualism, 279. 
Goethe's Faust, 280. 
Goodness, a manifestation of God, 274. 

Haeckel's materialism, 282. 
Haldane quoted, 238. 
Hegel, 238. 

Herder's "Self," quoted, 235f. 
Hocking, 208 note; quoted, 128, 235. 

Homogeneity, as the result of a single creative impulse, 73. 
dependent on free creativity, 76. 

Idealism, evil its chief problem, 256. 
Ideals, cultural, of individualism, 282f. 
Image, as the description of matter, 33, 37-39. 

dual meaning of the term as used by Bergson, 33, 37- 
39, 176f. 
Immanence, doctrine of, tends toward pantheism, 263f. 

its meaning, 264f. 
Immortality, in the Bergsonian system, 174, 188ff. 

personal, important to philosophy, 188f. 
Impersonalism, against the moral order, 155. 
in Bergson's God, 154. 

philosophy, 25, 154, 176f. 
in neo-realism, 198. 
in world-ground, untenable, 213, 274f. 
Incarnation assumes moral attributes essential, 274. 

demanded by practical problems of life, 271f. 
eternal, 271f. 

inconsistent with a static God, 270f. 
not limiting, 272. 
of God in Christ, 164, 171f, 190f. 
philosophically grounded, 270. 
Individualism and autocracy, 283. 
evolution, 283. 
contrasted with personalism, 277f. 
in conflict with personalism, 286. 
297 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Individualism, in education, 279. 
ethics, 280. 
Methodism, 281. 
philosophy, 282. 
religion, 281. 
science, 282. 

the Bolshevik movement, 281. 
its achievements, 278. 

cultural ideals, 282f. 
of Nietzsche, 284. 
weakness of, 283f . 
Individuality applied to personality, 181f. 
Instinct, applied by Bergson to organic and inorganic worlds, 
82-87. 
conscious and unconscious, 85, 135. 
human, intelligent, 90ff. 
in tropisms, 87-89, 135. 
unadaptibility of, 95f. 
Instinctive action in religion, 105f. 
Intellectualization, connected with freedom, 140f . 

fades from habitual action, 105f. 
Mr. Bergson's bane, 51, 76f. 
Intelligence, adaptable to change, 95. 

in religion, 103f. 
Intuition and genius, 100. 

revelation, 99ff. 
as a guide in vital matters, 80, 93ff. 

approach to life, 86, 104ff. 
human, inseparable from intelligence, 90, 98, lOlff, 

184f. 
inaccurately used by Bergson, 86f . 
in religion, 103f. 

in the philosophy of change, 82, 86. 
"pure," 50. 

so-called, established by habit, 80f, 140f. 
theory of as an aid to religious ideas, 99fl. 
Intuitionalism and French romanticism, 24. 
Intuitions, moral, related to habit, 106. 

Jones, Thomas S., Jr., poem "Sometimes," quoted, 249f. 

Kant, 242, 247. 

criticized by Bergson, 152. 
by Haldane, 238. 
Knowles, Frederic Lawrence, "The Tenant," quoted, 192. 
Kultur in Goethe, 279. 

298 



INDEX 

Larcom, Lucy, "A Strip of Blue," quoted, 127. 
Law of the sufficient reason, 261. 
Life, as duration, 71. 

intersection of matter and spirit, 153f. 
minimum cognition, 76. 
movement, 33, 37-39, 45. 
God's perfect attribute, 268. 

in God implies enriching content of experience, 266. 
the expression of personality, finite or infinite, 72. 
Lowell, James Russell, quotation from "Under the Willows," 63. 

Materialism, of Haeckel, 282. 

problem of error its chief difficulty, 31, 217. 
Matter and life, Bergson's failure at distinguishing, 36. 
Matter as a factor in its own genesis, 35. 
as exhausted life, 35. 

the inverse of movement, 33. 
described as image, 32, 37-39. 
defined by Bergson, 31, 37-39. 

as independent of memory, 54. 
Memory and life, 54. 

personality, 60, 64. 
as synonymous with spirit, 59. 
and the intersection of mind and matter, 58, 64. 
Bergson's definition, 55. 
defined, 60. 

dependence on materiality, 65. 
independent of matter, 54. 
must be of concrete facts, 60. 
"pure," 55-59, 63. 
Metaphysical explanation must include intelligence, 66. 
Methodism a phase of the individualistic movement, 281. 
Miracle not provided for in the philosophy of change, 102f. 

valuable as an indication of purpose, 103, 138f. 
Moral achievement, high point in personality, 155. 
attainment the goal of creative activity, 267. 
qualities in God the essential ones, 273f. 
reality of moment to philosophy, 242. 
Morality in education, 279f. 
Movement, as life, 33, 45. 

as transference of a state, 45. 
as world-ground, 45-49, 156f. 
Mystery in personality may be studied, 254. 

in ultimate explanation 67, 79, 220f., 237. 

Naidu, Sarojini, poem "Suttee" quoted, 190. 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Neitzsche, representative of individualism, 284. 
Neo-realism, affirms error as subjectivity, 204. 

and the problem of dissociation, 211. 

close to idealism in affirming reality of "relation," 

203f., 229f., 251f. 
distinguished from personal realism, 200ff. 
fails to solve dualism, 204f, 251. 
fundamental propositions of, 198-201. 
pluralistic, 204f. 

provides neither unity nor continuity in expe- 
rience, 201. 
seeking reality apart from personality must 
fail, 196, 229f. 
Neo-realistic doctrine of relation, abstract, 253f . 

tendency in Bergson, 58, 61, 77. 
Number, a term of distinction, 116. 
as applied concretely 115f. 
counted in space or in duration, 114f. 

Oppositions of philosophy, 21 7f. 
Organism, self-constructive, 219. 

Perception, and intell equalization, 4 If, 200. 
contrasted with spirit, 42. 
crux of problem in self -identification, 199f. 
dependent on self-defining quality of personality, 

200. 
inseparable from intellectualization, 43, 200. 
"pure," 50, 54-58, 185. 

has no concrete meaning, 62. 
hypothetical nature acknowledged by 

Bergson, 58. 
never devoid of intellectualization, 77. 
Perfection in God implies life, 268. 
Perry, R. B., 204, 229; quoted, 224f. 
Personal equation in perception, 42, 57. 
Personal idealism holds to self-consciousness as fundamental, 

211. 
Personal identity of another order than mathematical iden- 
tity, 226. 
Personalism and the dualism of matter and spirit, 37, 186f. 
and the philosophy of change, 26. 
contrasted with individualism, 277ff. 
in conflict with individualism, 286. 
its ideals, 284f. 
providesfor "God, freedom, and immortality," 274. 

300 



INDEX 

Personal realism, affirms indivisibility of personality, 201ff. 
distinguished from neo-realism, 200ff. 
holds only to reality in the concrete, 202f. 
holds personality fundamental to the world- 
ground, 212. 
offers concrete object, for study, 80. 
provides a synthesis for the dualism of mind 

and matter, 250f. 
provides for a true relation of persons to 

space and time, 24 7f. 
provides for efficient causation, 240ff . 
provides a philosophical basis for the doc- 
trine of incarnation 270f . 
the acceptance of an indivisible "self," 180, 

199f. 
the expression of relations, 74. 
the synthesis of mind and matter, 58. 
Personal Realism's definition of reality, 253. 
Personality, and duration, 44, 61, 7 If, 215f, 230f. 
memory, 60, 64. 

recognition of other personalities, 227f. 
as ground of being, 71, 154f., 190f., 193f., 200, 

206ff., 212ft\, 228f., 233f„ 238. 
Bergson's view, 39f, 176-178, 186. 
distinction between human and divine, 214. 
distinguished by, creativity, 131, 215, 218f, 237. 
moral action, 155. 
moral self-consciousness, 236f. 
self-identity, 178ff, 200, 250. 
in world-ground objected to as limitation, 21 3f. 
its dissociations are those of conscious states, 

208ff. 
its place in personal realism, 223ff. 
not an association of conscious states, 224. 
perfection in, implies complete transcendence of 

time and space, 21 4f, 248. 
so-called multiple, 208ff. 
the highest gift of life, 259. 
the indivisible unit of reality, 223f. 
key to metaphysics, 220, 238f. 
solution of the antithesis between perception 

and memory, 62-64, 72. 
source of unity, 206f. 
ultimate mystery, 67f, 220f, 237f. 
ultimate self-causing reality, 276. 
time-transcending, 145f, 159, 21 4f, 24 7f. 
301 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Personality, unity of, source of recovery from "dissociation," 

209f. 
Philosophy influenced by individualism, 282. 
Philosophy of change, appearance in history, 23. 
relation to Descartes, 23. 
Piat, La Personne Humaine, quoted, 203f, 224 and note. 
Pluralism in the neo-realistic view, 204f. 
Pluralistic realism ignores problem of error, 255. 
Pluralistic universe, if consistent, inexplicable accident, 

205f. 
Poincare, Henri, quoted, 91. 
Prince, Dr. Morton, 209 note. 
Problem, chief, of realism, 254f. 
Psycho-parallelism, 79. 
Purpose in the world-ground, 263. 

Qualitative change referred to quantitative difference, 246. 

Qualities as movement, 34, 45, 50f. 

Quantitative vs. qualitative attributes in God, 273. 

Race experience imaginary, 85. 
Realism, crude, 25 If. 

in perception, 78f, 197, 215. 

its service to thought, 197. 
Realistic element in personal realism, 201f, 225. 
Reality defined by personal realism, 253. 
Reality, fundamental, personal, 237f. 
Relation of neo-realism an abstraction, 253. 
Religion as intuitional, 103f. 

in education, 279. 

intelligent, 103f. 
Renaissance, influence, 277. 
Revelation, and intelligence, lOlf. 
and miracle, 138ff. 
tested by morality, 101. 
Rolling snowball of experience, 61. 
Rousseau, and romantic literature, 287f. 

as the spokesman of individualism, 278. 
Rousseau's Emile, 279. 
Russell, Bertrand, 187, 226. 

Saint Augustine's prayer, 141. 
Santayana, 186. 

Science influenced by individualism, 282. 
Scientists, metaphysical conclusions of, 245. 
Self, intuitional and intellectual not separated, 184f. 
302 



INDEX 

Self-consciousness, perfect, the foremost affirmation regarding 
God, 161. 

the higher, of personality, 236f. 
Self-creativity, in God and man, 169ff, 218f, 231f, 236f, 242. 

in ultimate being, 174. 
Self-definition necessary to personality, 200, 225f. 
Self-development and self-sacrifice, 256f. 
Self-identity at heart of freedom, 159. 

in personality, 178ff, 226f. 
Shakespeare, 131. 

Sitaris and sphex as examples of intuition, 94. 
Skepticism of Spencer, 151. 
Space and time, a means of relation, 11 If. 

cannot be thought in homogeneous terms, 

113f. 
must not be solipsistic, 11 If. 
validated by supreme creative intelligence, 
112. 
Space as homogeneous, 108. 

not needed for counting, 116. 
Spencer, 261. 
Spencer's skepticism, 151, 169f. 

Unknowable, 261. 
Spinoza, 280. 

Spinoza's idea of causality, 143, 
Spirit, as binding the moments of duration, 43. 

as synonymous with memory, 59. 
Spirit differentiated from perception, 4 If. 
Symbolism in science, 244. 

"Things as they are," of realism, 215. 
Thought not explained by vibration, 52. 
Time, as bastard space, 109, 118f. 
and duration, 120ff. 
and freedom derive meaning from the incompleteness 

of the world, 128. 
and space, a means of relation, 111, 247. 

can mean for God only an uncompleted 

world, 267. 
must not be solipsistic, 11 If, 247. 
not to be thought in homogeneous terms, 

llSf. 
validated by a supreme creative intelligence, 
112, 147. 
and the world-ground, 119, 127f, 166f, 214f, 247. 
as an arbitrary measure, 118f. 
303 



BERGSON AND PERSONAL REALISM 

Time, as contracted experience, 117f. 

flown, as homogeneous with space, 113. 
transcended only by personality, 47, 166f, 214, 248. 
Time transcendence, necessary tc consciousness of succession 

or change, 166f. 
Transcendence of God as important as immanence, 265. 
Truth, nature by Bergson's doctrine of intuition, 96f. 

pragmatic nature, 97. 
Truths, universal, 97. 

Unchanging element in personality necessary to thought, 159. 
Unity of personality, source of recovery from dissociation, 

209f. 
Unity to be found in personality, 206f . 

Vibrations, as mental product, 49. 

as qualities, 34, 46, 52, 246. 
Vibratory theory, as metaphysical explanation, 45-47, 50, 156. 

as related to duration, 117f. 

does not account for thought, 52f . 

materialistic implication of, 47f. 

the result of "intellectualization," 50f. 
Vital elan, an abstraction, 262. 

when effective becomes personal, 262. 
Vital impulse as source of homogeneity, 73. 

World-ground, as impersonal 274f. 

personal, 193f, 212f, 21 5f, 227. 
in Bergson's theory, 153f. 
intelligent, 99, 212. 
personal, an epistemological necessity, 193. 

provides for "God, freedom, and 
immortality," 274. 
purposive, 263. 

Zeno, paradoxes of, 197. 



304 



